"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "English, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Grizenko, Marisa Katherine"@en . "2012-11-14T19:21:39Z"@en . "2012"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "This thesis takes as its starting point the culturally potent figure of the alcoholic modernist, who, heroically facing existential despair, is predominantly gendered as male. Pointing to the absence of the female alcoholic as writer and subject in critical accounts of modernism, I argue that a drunk narrative, written by and about women, exists alongside the prototypical male narrative, and call for a re-examination of the modernist writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s relationship to alcohol. Exploring the historical and cultural contexts that have contributed to the gendering of alcoholism and drinking practices in general, as well as the gendering of the modernist artist in particular, I then consider how writers Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles articulate their vision of the drinking woman. Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight sees protagonist Sasha Jansen employing the discursive category of female drunk as a tool of resistance in Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0098 patriarchal and capitalist urban economy. I situate her as tactically capitalizing, in a de Certeauan fashion, on her abjection and visibility. Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies extends Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s individual drunkenness to an overarching, abstracted drunkenness that reflects the worldview of the text. I trace how drunkenness functions thematically and linguistically in the two female protagonists\u00E2\u0080\u0098 existential quests. While identifying existing gaps in the scholarship, I also hope to gesture to rich areas of potential research and model a reading practice that explores female interventions in the male modernist drunk narrative."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/43579?expand=metadata"@en . " Two Drunk Ladies: The Modernist Drunk Narrative and the Female Alcoholic in the Fiction of Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles by Marisa Katherine Grizenko B.A. (Hons.), Concordia University, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2012 \u00C2\u00A9 Marisa Katherine Grizenko, 2012 ii Abstract This thesis takes as its starting point the culturally potent figure of the alcoholic modernist, who, heroically facing existential despair, is predominantly gendered as male. Pointing to the absence of the female alcoholic as writer and subject in critical accounts of modernism, I argue that a \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 written by and about women, exists alongside the prototypical male narrative, and call for a re-examination of the modernist writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s relationship to alcohol. Exploring the historical and cultural contexts that have contributed to the gendering of alcoholism and drinking practices in general, as well as the gendering of the modernist artist in particular, I then consider how writers Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles articulate their vision of the drinking woman. Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight sees protagonist Sasha Jansen employing the discursive category of female drunk as a tool of resistance in Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0098 patriarchal and capitalist urban economy. I situate her as tactically capitalizing, in a de Certeauan fashion, on her abjection and visibility. Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies extends Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s individual drunkenness to an overarching, abstracted drunkenness that reflects the worldview of the text. I trace how drunkenness functions thematically and linguistically in the two female protagonists\u00E2\u0080\u0098 existential quests. While identifying existing gaps in the scholarship, I also hope to gesture to rich areas of potential research and model a reading practice that explores female interventions in the male modernist drunk narrative. iii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iv Dedication ..................................................................................................................................................... v 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 1 Critical Contexts ....................................................................................................................................... 4 Historical Contexts .................................................................................................................................. 12 The Modernist Drunk Narrative .............................................................................................................. 22 Authors and Texts under Consideration .................................................................................................. 24 2 \u00E2\u0080\u0095A Guileful Ruse\u00E2\u0080\u0096: Female Drunkenness as Masquerade in Jean Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Good Morning, Midnight ...... 30 Tactics ..................................................................................................................................................... 35 Sasha as Spectacle ................................................................................................................................... 37 The Abject ............................................................................................................................................... 47 3 \u00E2\u0080\u0095I Talk One Way\u00E2\u0080\u0096: Narrating over Gin (and Wine) in Jane Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Two Serious Ladies .................... 52 \u00E2\u0080\u0095You Flop Around like a Little Baby\u00E2\u0080\u0096: Speech as Primitive State ......................................................... 57 \u00E2\u0080\u0095Giving an Account of Oneself\u00E2\u0080\u0096 ............................................................................................................. 63 4 Coda ......................................................................................................................................................... 69 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................ 71 iv Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks to my supervisory committee, Dr. John Xiros Cooper and Dr. Mary Chapman, for their valuable insight and advice; to Katharine Streip for stimulating and challenging my thinking and for offering endless support over the years; to Adrianna Eyking, whose penetrating insight and generous feedback shaped my writing and thought; to Steven Maye, for his friendship and expert cooking; to my sisters, Sophie and Chloe, for their love and good humour; and lastly, to Tyson Gratton for his patience, enthusiasm, and love. I want to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Fonds qu\u00C3\u00A9b\u00C3\u00A9coise de recherche sur la soci\u00C3\u00A9t\u00C3\u00A9 et la culture, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. v Dedication To my parents for being wonderful, always 1 Introduction \u00E2\u0080\u0095Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano In Ernest Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s short story \u00E2\u0080\u0095Hills like White Elephants,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 an American man and his female companion, Jig, are sitting at a bar in a train station in Spain. They order beer, look at the scenery, and then order more drinks, skirting around the issue of Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s potential abortion. Indeed, in their evasive, halting dialogue, alcohol serves to displace talk of the pregnancy. When Jig tries a new drink, she concludes that it \u00E2\u0080\u0095tastes of licorice,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as \u00E2\u0080\u0095[e]verything\u00E2\u0080\u0096 does (212). \u00E2\u0080\u0095Especially,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she adds, \u00E2\u0080\u0095all the things you\u00E2\u0080\u0098ve waited so long for, like absinthe\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (212). Absinthe is clearly an inadequate surrogate for that which Jig has \u00E2\u0080\u0095waited so long for,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 yet a desire for it, however sarcastic, can be safely uttered aloud. Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s desire to keep the baby, on the other hand, is expressed in vague, ambivalent terms that are easily dismissed by the man, eager to convince her not to do so. That the story is superficially \u00E2\u0080\u0095about\u00E2\u0080\u0096 drinking is significant: the couple\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking, their attention to different kinds of drinks and the rituals they entail, signifies their claim to modernity. To drink suggests fashionability and cosmopolitanism, especially for an American in Europe during the era of Prohibition. 1 Yet it also connotes the emptiness and sense of ennui born of a culture of consumption, with Jig saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095That\u00E2\u0080\u0098s all we do, isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t it\u00E2\u0080\u0094look at things and try new drinks?\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (212). Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s alignment of the acts of looking and drinking is telling as both come to be associated with modernism. If, as cultural theorist Liz Conor argues, \u00E2\u0080\u0095the significatory scene of 1 James Nicholls explains how Prohibition ultimately led to alcohol consumption\u00E2\u0080\u0098s being viewed as \u00E2\u0080\u0095deviant\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095glamorous\u00E2\u0080\u0096: \u00E2\u0080\u0095For the exiled writers and artists living in Paris in the 1920s, drinking was not only a public rejection of the powerful puritanical forces back in America, it was a means of engaging with the radical rejection of established order that European modernism represented\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (\u00E2\u0080\u0095Introduction\u00E2\u0080\u0096 18-19). 2 the twentieth-century West privileges the visual\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (6), then drinking emerges as a visible, public means of asserting a modern, fashionable identity. To look and to drink is to be a consumer, but also to conceive of oneself as such\u00E2\u0080\u0094as a looking and drinking subject. Published in 1927, Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story reflects this codification of alcohol consumption as a thoroughly modern practice, but it also points to alcohol\u00E2\u0080\u0098s increasing presence in the modernist text. In these texts, drinking is not simply employed descriptively, as something that people do, but thematically; in Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story, Jig and the American\u00E2\u0080\u0098s underlying argument\u00E2\u0080\u0094that which is not said\u00E2\u0080\u0094is set in relief by their drinking. Their adherence to a lifestyle of travel, consumption, and fashion, which is placed in opposition to \u00E2\u0080\u0095hav[ing] everything\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (213), to having a baby, is communicated in large part by their drinking. I open with Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story for several reasons. First, it is emblematic of a type of modernist fiction that thematizes alcohol consumption, employing it in order to speak to the modern moment in all its complexity. As James Nicholls, a scholar of the history of alcohol and society, phrases it, \u00E2\u0080\u0095In a world reeling under the massive conceptual shifts which Wyndham Lewis described as \u00E2\u0080\u0097the everyday drunkenness of the normal real,\u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00E2\u0080\u0096 writers employed alcohol \u00E2\u0080\u0095as a fundamental structure in their narrative schemes, [as] the optic through which a complex network of representations [is] brought to light\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (\u00E2\u0080\u0095Introduction\u00E2\u0080\u0096 19). Second, its author, arguably one of the most prominent practitioners of this type of writing, has himself become emblematic of the modernist writer as alcoholic. And third and most importantly, Hemingway tells a story not unlike the one I intend to tell here\u00E2\u0080\u0093\u00E2\u0080\u0093of the way in which the woman Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative (and the narratives of her real-life and fictional contemporaries), her point of view, is silenced. I will return to this final point later, and will now consider the relationship between the modernist writer and alcoholism in greater detail. 3 Alcohol consumption and addiction are made textual, visible, just as modernist writers are themselves proclaimed to be alcoholic. As Americanist scholar John W. Crowley writes: Within an emergent culture of conspicuous consumption, addiction would become, in effect, the sign of modernity itself. \u00E2\u0080\u0095Alcoholism\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and literary \u00E2\u0080\u0095modernism\u00E2\u0080\u0096 emerged together in a dialectical relationship that produced, in the drunk narrative, both a portrait of the modernist as an alcoholic and a portrait of the alcoholic as a modernist. (White 18) While determining the exact reasons why so many modernist writers, mostly American, were alcoholics is outside my purview, the discursive construction of them as such is of great interest here. In accordance with Baudelaire\u00E2\u0080\u0098s famous dictum to \u00E2\u0080\u0095always be drunk\" (149), writers and artists have long used alcohol and other intoxicants in ways that have significantly shaped their cultural reception. Psychiatrist Donald W. Goodwin blames Edgar Allan Poe for ushering into America the romantic tradition in which \u00E2\u0080\u0095writers and poets were expected to be tragic, lonely, and doomed\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (183). Indeed, alcohol consumption not only served as an identity marker of the modernist artist, but was also associated with an artist\u00E2\u0080\u0098s generative potential. If Poe was the portrait of the artist as a tragic, lonely alcoholic, William Faulkner, according to literary critic Tom Dardis, is the portrait of the alcoholic as modernist: Faulkner \u00E2\u0080\u0095drank alcoholically for nearly fifty years,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 he observes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095and remained confident to the end that his extraordinary powers derived, at least in part, from alcohol. When Faulkner remarked that \u00E2\u0080\u0097civilization begins with distillation,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 he was not joking but stating what he believed to be self-evident: a writer requires the liberating infusion of whiskey in order to reveal the nature of the world around him\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (7).2 2 The connection between drinking and achieving an alternative perspective (\u00E2\u0080\u0095the liberating infusion of whiskey\u00E2\u0080\u0096) in modernist literature has also been noted by Thomas B. Gilmore. \u00E2\u0080\u0095If two of the leading characteristics of modernism are a radical dissatisfaction with commonplace reality and a consequent attempt to undermine conventional reality 4 Thus, the drinking writer has been understood as one who responds to existential despair with a raised glass, who transgresses the bounds of propriety and stuffy conservatism, who courts disaster as a reprieve from his consuming genius, who channels his libidinal energies into drink. In a post-war climate characterized by disillusionment, trauma, and chaos, in the wake of \u00E2\u0080\u0095a sacrifice for which there is no recompense\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Armstrong 18), the modernist writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s only suitable response is to drink himself out of sobriety. And as these examples indicate and the next section will demonstrate, the drunk modernist writer is almost always \u00E2\u0080\u0095himself.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 The figure of the drinking modernist writer engenders many discursive formulations, but significantly, they are almost exclusively gendered as male. The alcoholic female modernist, when she is acknowledged to exist at all, has generally been excluded from the discourse\u00E2\u0080\u0093\u00E2\u0080\u0093her voice silenced, ignored, like Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s is, appropriately, in Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Critical Contexts If this exclusion wasn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t evident in the excerpts from Goodwin and Dardis above, we can also see it in the work of other scholars who explicitly explore the figure of the writer as alcoholic, such as Thomas B. Gilmore, Edmund B. O\u00E2\u0080\u0098Reilly, and Matts G. Djos. Gilmore mentions Dorothy Parker\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story \u00E2\u0080\u0095Big Blonde\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in passing and regrets not being able to discuss Brian Moore\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, \u00E2\u0080\u0095a masterful study of the shifts and evasions of a woman alcoholic trying to deny her problem\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (16); otherwise, female alcoholics receive no treatment. Goodwin, in making the case for an American \u00E2\u0080\u0095epidemic\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of alcoholic writers, offers this in his 1988 study: by greatly altering traditional states of consciousness,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 he suggests, \u00E2\u0080\u0095the fundamental challenge to and ruptures of these states offered by heavy drinking may seem desirable from a modernist viewpoint\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (170). 5 In the case of American writers who have won the Nobel Prize in literature, the alcoholism rate is over 70 percent. First there was Sinclair Lewis\u00E2\u0080\u0094very alcoholic. Then came Eugene O\u00E2\u0080\u0098Neill\u00E2\u0080\u0094very alcoholic. Next was Pearl Buck, who hardly drank. (Women are less often alcoholic than men\u00E2\u0080\u0094protected, so to speak\u00E2\u0080\u0094and Buck was raised by missionary parents in China; hence, very protected.) Then followed William Faulkner\u00E2\u0080\u0094very alcoholic. Then Ernest Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0094alcoholic. (\u00E2\u0080\u0095Drinking is a way of ending the day\u00E2\u0080\u0096). John Steinbeck comes next\u00E2\u0080\u0094a \u00E2\u0080\u0095two- fisted\u00E2\u0080\u0096 drinker by some accounts, alcoholic by others.3 (2-3) Goodwin never clarifies what he means by \u00E2\u0080\u0095protection\u00E2\u0080\u0096 or explains how this protection from alcoholism is conferred upon women. In a long list of alcoholic American writers, Goodwin does name Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Jean Stafford, but they receive no further notice. Similarly, Dardis lists Millay, Stafford, Carson McCullers, and Djuna Barnes, but concludes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[w]ith few exceptions, American women writers have not been alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (6). He briefly discusses Zelda Fitzgerald\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking in a chapter devoted to her husband, but does so primarily in order to illustrate the difficulties she posed for him. When drinking, Zelda\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095naturally high spirits, which many men took to be sexually provocative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (103), coupled with her \u00E2\u0080\u0095madness\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (102), caused problems for Fitzgerald as both a husband and a writer. While Zelda is not one of Dardis\u00E2\u0080\u0098s subjects, her portrayal as an alcoholic is intimately tied to her mental illness and perceived sexual impropriety. 4 O\u00E2\u0080\u0098Reilly, discussing twelve\u00E2\u0080\u0093step programs such as AA, calls for 3 Goodwin continues by discounting T.S. Eliot, \u00E2\u0080\u0095who spent most of his life in England [and] became a naturalized English citizen\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (3), then dismisses Saul Bellow from the list of alcoholics on account of his being Jewish. He writes: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Jews, like women, are \u00E2\u0080\u0097protected\u00E2\u0080\u0098 against alcoholism, regardless of occupation, for reasons one can only guess at. Bellow drinks moderately\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (3). Later he writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Polish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer won the award and lives in America, but writes in Yiddish\u00E2\u0080\u0094clear grounds for exclusion\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (3). 4 Dardis does acknowledge how Fitzgerald privately justified \u00E2\u0080\u0095his drinking on the grounds that he was married to a madwoman. This placed the responsibility for his continued drinking squarely on Zelda\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (118). He continues by quoting Fitzgerald, in a meeting with Dr. Rennie in May of 1933, as saying of his wife, \u00E2\u0080\u0095The first time I met her I saw she was a drunkard\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (118). While Dardis neglects to comment on the gendered dynamics at work here, his 6 \u00E2\u0080\u0095usable new patterns of female narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0094narratives that embody and respond to the actual conditions of women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s lives\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (14-15), yet in his own analyses he examines only male-authored texts. Djos, for his part, includes an entry on Millay in the appendix of his work and briefly considers the themes of her poetry, beginning with this rather perplexing statement: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Edna St. Vincent Millay was a good deal more sentimental than [John] Berryman\u00E2\u0080\u0094as one might expect\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (81). Of the studies discussed above, frequently cited as pioneers in the study of writers and alcoholism, only Crowley\u00E2\u0080\u0098s The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction devotes significant space to a discussion of a female writer. To his analyses of the role of alcohol in the life and work of six male writers, Crowley adds an insightful chapter on Djuna Barnes, exploring how Nightwood\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Robin Vote, bisexual and alcoholic, complicates the \u00E2\u0080\u0095heterosexist assumptions\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of \u00E2\u0080\u0095the modernist culture of drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (White 129-130). Writers Alfred Kazin and Gore Vidal have taken up similar surveys from their respective positions as participants in the literary scene. Written for a popular audience\u00E2\u0080\u0094Kazin\u00E2\u0080\u0098s article appearing in Commentary, Vidal\u00E2\u0080\u0098s in The New York Review of Books\u00E2\u0080\u0094these overviews echo those conducted in the academy, with a few of the women writers listed above given but the most cursory treatment. Another work that finds frequent mention in this field of study is novelist Donald Newlove\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers, which is partly an account of famous writers\u00E2\u0080\u0098 alcoholism and partly a memoir where he recounts his own addiction to alcohol and subsequent recovery. Newlove, addressing female alcoholism, writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[i]f you read Anne Sexton you\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll think lady drunks have special problems of moods and ego, and a painful sensitivity and suffering only they can know. I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t think alcohol really cares\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (126). He inclusion of these biographical anecdotes points to some of the ways in which the female alcoholic has been discursively defined: as mad, shameful, and transgressive. 7 follows this by asserting that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[a]lcohol is a great leveller of the sexes, it\u00E2\u0080\u0098s the same walking death: I can\u00E2\u0080\u0098t handle it, pour me another\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (127). Newlove\u00E2\u0080\u0098s claim might accurately speak to the alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0098s bodily experience of alcoholism, an experience that can be universalized in so far as it manifests itself in a \u00E2\u0080\u0095walking death.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Yet his remarks\u00E2\u0080\u0094besides dismissing female experience and describing women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s complaints as illegitimate\u00E2\u0080\u0094neglect to consider the societal factors that may produce or enable the production of an alcoholic subject differently according to gender and other identity markers. Furthermore, the social reality of being a female alcoholic, of being a female drunk in a world in which that is resoundingly unacceptable, is elided here in favour of a homogenizing, male-oriented narrative about the drinker\u00E2\u0080\u0098s experience. The works considered above are marked by a glaring lack of discussion addressing women as both writers and alcoholics. This is not for lack of space, as most perform as overviews offering broad surveys of literary scenes and their many participants; the works that do focus on specific authors offer a contextual framework in the introduction that establishes a who\u00E2\u0080\u0098s who of alcoholic writers. Taken together, these studies point to an impressive and varied list of writers, including Malcolm Lowry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Eugene O\u00E2\u0080\u0098Neill, John Cheever, Kingsley Amis, John Berryman, George Orwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Edmund Wilson, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Ernest Hemingway, Edward Arlington Robinson, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, James Thurber, John O\u00E2\u0080\u0098Hara, Charles Jackson, Jack London, Dylan Thomas, Ring Lardner, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, and Thomas Wolfe. While the argument can be made that there were (and are) fewer alcoholic women than men and that of these even fewer have become canonical writers, the list above features lesser known writers along with the more celebrated ones. 5 Would it be untenable 5 Historically, there have been fewer female alcoholics\u00E2\u0080\u0094and female drinkers in general\u00E2\u0080\u0094than male ones in Western societies. Mark Lender and James Martin write that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[n]ineteenth- and early-twentieth century estimates suggest that 8 for a writer such as Dorothy Parker, for example, to be included in such company? The scant attention directed towards alcoholic female writers, while speaking to the subordinate position of women writers in the cultural and academic lexicon, reveals the ways in which the alcoholic writer\u00E2\u0080\u0094indeed, the very figure of the alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0094is conventionally represented as male. In these surveys, there is little interest in considering the situation of female alcoholics, particularly in a way that might grant them status as important literary figures. Literary critic and biographer Brett C. Millier\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work on American women poets and alcohol consumption addresses this critical gap by examining the work of seven American women poets and their relationship with alcohol. She begins, however, by discussing a reviewer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s objection to her describing Elizabeth Bishop, in a biography of the poet, as an alcoholic: To me, Bishop\u00E2\u0080\u0098s alcoholism was a fact, and Anthony Hecht\u00E2\u0080\u0098s refusal to acknowledge it was puzzling. He could name with ease those men who drank loudly and obviously and who wrote about drinking; but he could not recognize the same condition in Elizabeth Bishop. Did he (and others of her friends) not realize that Bishop struggled so desperately with alcohol? Or did he object to her being \u00E2\u0080\u0095exposed\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as an alcoholic, in a way he did not with the male poets of her between one out of ten to one out of three problem drinkers were women\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (117). They qualify this by suggesting that fewer women sought treatment than men because of the social stigma imposed on female alcoholics, which \u00E2\u0080\u0095led to the now familiar \u00E2\u0080\u0097hidden alcoholism\u00E2\u0080\u0098 among women\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (118). A 2002 article from the Harvard Review of Psychiatry explains this \u00E2\u0080\u0095now familiar\u00E2\u0080\u0096 phenomenon: \u00E2\u0080\u0095In studies of treatment-seeking alcohol-dependent men and women, women have often been underrepresented because fewer of them seek treatment in alcohol-specific treatment facilities\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Greenfield 76). As for the smaller number of canonical female writers, perhaps this is simply a reflection of the fact that fewer women writers were acknowledged at the time these critics were writing. Moreover, Crowley suggests that \u00E2\u0080\u0095women writers have been largely excluded from [the modernist] canon because the formative literary-historical narratives center on the Great War, of which women had only peripheral experience\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (88). 9 generation? It was clear that, either way, he was thinking about her drinking very differently than that of Berryman or Dylan Thomas. (xii) Millier attributes this reaction to the gendered implications tied to drinking: culturally and critically, female drinkers do not occupy the same discursive territory as their male counterparts. That \u00E2\u0080\u0095the modernists\u00E2\u0080\u0094the white males especially\u00E2\u0080\u0094were a decidedly drunken lot\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Crowley White x) has become a truism of contemporary culture; indeed the archetype of the drinking writer largely originates with this group. Historian Jack S. Blocker, Jr., explains how \u00E2\u0080\u0095rebellious youth\u00E2\u0080\u0094mainly middle-class students in colleges or universities\u00E2\u0080\u0094began to use alcohol as a badge of modern, cosmopolitan tastes,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 finding \u00E2\u0080\u0095[t]heir models [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] in the writings of the \u00E2\u0080\u0097Lost Generation\u00E2\u0080\u0098 of American intellectuals and on the movie screens of the 1920s\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (232- 233). The formation of the writer as alcoholic coincides with the rise of an American celebrity culture, in which the writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s lifestyle and behaviour becomes inseparable from the aesthetic and cultural cachet of his work. Speaking to this emerging culture of celebrity, modernism scholar Jonathan Goldman writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[m]odernism generates a figure of the author as a unique, larger- than-life personality, a choreographer of disparate discourses and repository of encoded meaning, though one that can only be read as such after it has been turned into a kind of object\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (2). Goldman and literary scholar Timothy W. Galow, among others, consider how celebrity culture has influenced the reception, dissemination, and interpretation of modernist texts; however, neither explicitly examines how alcohol\u00E2\u0080\u0094as consumed and thematized\u00E2\u0080\u0094contributes to the formation of the modernist writer as celebrity. I contend that one way in which modernist writers are made into objects, into commodities, is through their status as heavy drinkers. Modernist writers, \u00E2\u0080\u0095by producing a literature that idealized intoxication as iconoclasm and lionized the drunk as an anti-\u00E2\u0080\u0097Puritan\u00E2\u0080\u0098 rebel\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Crowley \u00E2\u0080\u0095Alcoholism\u00E2\u0080\u0096 174), effectively made 10 drinking a cultural requirement for any writer who aimed for fame and success, who desired the literary lineage of a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald. The association of writing with alcohol consumption has been a discursively potent one, so much so that Newlove writes: Before I got sober, I feared that public knowledge that I was a recovering alcoholic would dim my chances as a writer, perhaps even lend me a leprous cast among my writing peers, the scarlet label SOBER stamped on my brow. \u00E2\u0080\u0095You mean he doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t drink ever? That must have an awful effect on his writing, don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t you think?\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (112) Newlove is expressing two concerns here: that his sobriety might alienate him from a literary culture in which alcohol consumption plays a prominent role and that the writing he produces would suffer (or be perceived to suffer) without the aid of drink. Newlove continues, writing: \u00E2\u0080\u0095My greatest difficulty was entertaining some thought of a Higher Power I might speak to in my heart. All my saints were dead drunks\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (106). The cultural mystique that has attached itself to male modernists\u00E2\u0080\u0098 drinking practices is pervasive; as is the case with the studies cited above, it is paradoxically propagated by those seeking to interrogate it. Dardis blames alcoholism for the \u00E2\u0080\u0095sad and premature loss of creativity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (6) that plagues his subjects, while Vidal contends that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[h]eavy drinking stopped Hemingway from writing anything of value in his later years; killed Fitzgerald at forty-four; turned the William Faulkner of As I Lay Dying into a fable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (276). Kazin, discussing Faulkner, writes: Some of the side experiences were alcoholic exhaustion, DT\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, whiskey ulcers, electroshock therapy, the many nicks and gashes in his head, broken ribs, falling downstairs, falls from horses, broken vertebrae, sweats, shakes, organic damage, fibrillation, blackouts. (47) 11 Many of the authors of these studies appear to wish to counter romantic portrayals of drinking writers, but their manner of critique is ultimately little more than a perfunctory condemnation of the ravages of alcoholism, a sombre acknowledgment that addiction has had serious and mostly deleterious effects on the writers they study. Instead of interrogating the discourse that frames the writer as alcoholic or of complicating our received ideas of the drinking writer by including those who are not white and male, these scholars and writers ultimately reinforce the reductive and gendered construction of the drinking modernist; moreover, their reluctance to engage the myth serves to reify it. Even when alcoholism is labelled as negative and harmful, it is done so in gendered terms. Faulkner\u00E2\u0080\u0098s broken ribs, Berryman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s suicide, Fitzgerald\u00E2\u0080\u0098s emotional collapse\u00E2\u0080\u0094all speak to the myth of the artist heroically and destructively confronting his demons and sacrificing himself to the muse of inebriation; similar events featuring female writers\u00E2\u0080\u0094 Millay\u00E2\u0080\u0098s accidental fall down the stairs after a night of writing and drinking comes to mind\u00E2\u0080\u0094 rarely retain the heroic part of the formulation. This failure to question many of the assumptions surrounding the drinking writer is par for the course with many addiction studies texts. Literary critic Sue Vice gives a brief account of the field\u00E2\u0080\u0098s history in her article \u00E2\u0080\u0095Intemperate Climate: Drinking, Sobriety, and the American Literary Myth.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 She writes: Addiction studies have followed a path more or less parallel to that of feminist criticism, which began by identifying images of women in texts, then concentrated on lost female novelists, and has latterly moved toward a concern with writing itself as gendered and gender as performative. Spotting images and biographies of alcoholics and addicts has, in addiction studies, been replaced by the scrupulous 12 efforts [...] to reconstruct a past temper and draw into the picture as many discourses as possible, however conflicting these may be. (709) Vice\u00E2\u0080\u0098s last point is directed to the field\u00E2\u0080\u0098s interdisciplinary ambitions, with literary analysis, historical context, and medical and psychological paradigms of addiction often all appearing within the same text. While I generally agree with Vice\u00E2\u0080\u0098s assessment, I would add that critical works identifying alcoholics and alcoholic texts, such as Goodwin\u00E2\u0080\u0098s study, have been followed by studies concerned with articulating the relationship between a writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s addiction and his or her work. Gilmore\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work, written in 1987, falls into this category, where he laments that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[o]ne might hope that full-dress biographies of drinking writers would deal more satisfactorily with a writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s complexities, including his drinking problem and its relationship with his work\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (5). This critical move has recently been followed by works such as Crowley\u00E2\u0080\u0098s that interrogate the assumptions and frameworks that make up addiction studies and its subjects. By engaging in literary analysis inflected by biographical research, my thesis aims to participate in this latest approach by calling attention to the discursive practices at work in the gendering of alcoholism and modernist writing. Historical Contexts The gendering of alcoholism and drinking practices in general has a long and complex history; for our purposes here, I will briefly examine Victorian attitudes about alcohol and gender held in the United States and Great Britain in order to situate twentieth-century discursive constructions of the female alcoholic. I focus on the United States and Great Britain for two reasons. First, my claims about the gendering of alcoholism speak, in particular, to Anglo- American modernism. Second, Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles, the authors of the texts considered in chapters two and three, wrote their works while living in England and the United States, 13 respectively. Although the picture is complicated by Rhys's colonial and \u00C3\u00A9migr\u00C3\u00A9 status\u00E2\u0080\u0094she was born and raised in the West Indies\u00E2\u0080\u0094and the fact that Bowles spent much of her life abroad, both writers worked and lived within an Anglo-American cultural context (among others). While Rhys's novel is set in Paris, the responses to the drunk female protagonist, Sasha, are identical to those she encounters in her home country of England. Thus, while Rhys and Bowles cannot be understood as strictly English or American, their writing certainly reflects and addresses the cultures of drink outlined in this chapter. Moreover, I situate them within these geographical and national boundaries not as a way of limiting them or their work, but in order to question their exclusion from addiction studies and other discourses related to modernism and alcoholism. In America, temperance movements took root in the late 1830s, with \u00E2\u0080\u0095temperance\u00E2\u0080\u0096 at first signifying the moderate consumption of beer and wine and a total abstention from distilled liquors (Murdock 11). While the word \u00E2\u0080\u0095temperance\u00E2\u0080\u0096 eventually came to mean total abstention from alcoholic beverages, it would be nearly a century before the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 federally instituted the prohibition of alcohol. 6 The temperance movement arose out of a religious climate in which intemperance was viewed as a mortal sin. 7 Reverend Mark Matthews, the pastor of Seattle\u00E2\u0080\u0098s First Presbyterian Church, attested to this view when he declared that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[t]he saloon is the most fiendish, corrupt, hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit...It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue, and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (qtd in Behr 22). Matthews\u00E2\u0080\u0098s remarks reflect 6 The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16 th , 1919; the law took effect a year later on January 17 th , 1920 and was repealed on December 5 th , 1933. Although alcohol consumption itself was never illegal, the manufacturing and selling of alcohol were. The Volstead Act, passed in October 1919, clarified the Amendment\u00E2\u0080\u0098s vague legislation, dictating that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[n]o person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorized in this act\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Behr 78). See Behr 78-79 on the Act\u00E2\u0080\u0098s famed exceptions. 7 It is also \u00E2\u0080\u0095no historical accident,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 writes historian Lilian Lewis Shiman, that the temperance movements in both America and England occurred in the nineteenth century since that was an era particularly marked by social reform (1). 14 the cultural attitude of his time, the assumption that alcohol presented a dangerous threat to women (and by extension, their fathers and husbands) because women under the influence transgress their designated social roles and in turn become degraded, sexually deviant threats to society. In another sense\u00E2\u0080\u0094an idea taken up with zeal by the Woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)\u00E2\u0080\u0094alcohol threatens women in so far as it intoxicates their husbands and fathers on whom they are entirely dependent. Significantly, here and elsewhere, the sinfulness of alcohol consumption is made tangible as it relates to women: Matthews, making a general case for the sinfulness of alcohol, must turn from the colourful descriptions of the hellish saloon in order to make the sin concrete in the figure of the drinking woman. These two Victorian conceptions of the woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s encounter with alcohol\u00E2\u0080\u0094one that codes her as a threat, the other as a victim\u00E2\u0080\u0094 would make lasting impressions on societal attitudes toward the female drinker well into the twentieth century. The nineteenth century viewed women as society\u00E2\u0080\u0098s pious, moral arbiters, as the innocents sacrificed to their husbands\u00E2\u0080\u0098 and fathers\u00E2\u0080\u0098 drunken binges. As Crowley writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095the cult of \u00E2\u0080\u0097True Womanhood\u00E2\u0080\u0098 made female abstemiousness a sign of gentility. The ideology of the temperance movement, moreover, deemed drunkenness to be almost exclusively a male problem\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (White 117). Historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock adds: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Barred by law or custom from divorcing inebriate husbands, unable to earn a living wage themselves, isolated in a society with few mechanisms to reform drinkers or aid their families, drunkards\u00E2\u0080\u0098 wives faced brutality, poverty, and abandonment\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (16). Beginning with the Woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Crusade of the 1870s, when throngs of women invaded saloons, singing hymns and praying for the souls of the owners and drinking customers, women as a group came to constitute alcohol\u00E2\u0080\u0098s principal enemy in the public imagination. Later, the WCTU and other women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s organizations were perceived as the driving 15 force behind Prohibition, with the Brewers Association actively working to fight women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s suffrage (Behr 47). Murdock argues that the fight for Prohibition effectively granted women a political identity, writing, \u00E2\u0080\u0095As an issue, alcohol, more than slavery or suffrage or any other single cause, effected American women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s politicization\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (9). In many ways, women advocated for temperance because they had not yet been enfranchised: having no financial or legal recourse to abusive husbands made the issue a particularly pressing one. Yet in fighting for an issue that elicited such passion, an issue that was felt to intimately affect the lives of many women across the country, women were introduced into the public sphere and, once introduced, many were reluctant to let it go. While it\u00E2\u0080\u0098s certainly true that the picture is a complex one\u00E2\u0080\u0094not all women were temperance advocates, not all Prohibitionists were pro-suffrage, not all \u00E2\u0080\u0095wets\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (the term for those opposing Prohibition) were against women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s politicization, etcetera\u00E2\u0080\u0094Prohibition and suffrage were strongly aligned, with women achieving suffrage in the USA around the same time that Prohibition came to pass. More important for my discussion, however, is that women were seen as waging a war on alcohol, on men\u00E2\u0080\u0098s homosocial territory; women, at least respectable women, were only associated with alcohol through their opposition to it. This, of course, made conceiving of the female drinker, let alone the female alcoholic, a difficult proposition. Murdock outlines how the \u00E2\u0080\u0095[d]iscussion of women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking and alcohol abuse was [...] rendered most problematic by the fact that drinking was, for the most part, a public, male activity conducted in public, male spaces.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Not only did \u00E2\u0080\u0095[w]omen drinkers [threaten] this gender division,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she adds, women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking was also \u00E2\u0080\u0095general[ly] associat[ed] with sexual depravity and with prostitution\u00E2\u0080\u0094a profession connected to public spaces and particularly to male saloons,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 thus \u00E2\u0080\u0095reinforc[ing the] horror over [a woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s] public drunknenness\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (43). Literary scholar Nicholas O. Warner, too, observes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[f]or middle-class 16 Americans the \u00E2\u0080\u0097ideal woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098 was a \u00E2\u0080\u0097paragon of social virtue and a guardian of the home,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 while the \u00E2\u0080\u0097alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0098 embodied all that threatened the ideal woman. Thus a drunken woman became a particularly heinous, almost unthinkable phenomenon\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (300; my emphasis), while Crowley adds: The female drunkard became nearly unimaginable except in the stereotype of the drunken harlot, who was almost invariably represented in temperance literature as an immigrant and/or working-class woman whose inebriation signified her defective racial stock and overall moral degeneracy. 8 (White 117; my emphasis) These critics, employing words like \u00E2\u0080\u0095unthinkable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095unimaginable,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 point to the female alcoholic as a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century taboo. The male alcoholic, while often vilified and seen as sinful, could retain his social rank as well as his claim to a normative masculine identity. The male alcoholic existed in public, in novels, in language. The female alcoholic, on the other hand, could only be invoked in extreme rhetorical manoeuvres (such as Matthews\u00E2\u0080\u0098s above), as a caricature, a symbol of debauchery. This lack of visibility and representation finds reflection in the cultural vocabulary as well. Crowley explains how the very label \u00E2\u0080\u0095alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0096 was reserved exclusively for men: 8 Prohibition, as much as it can \u00E2\u0080\u0095be viewed as a mandate against men\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking and against the common conflation of drink with masculinity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Rotskoff 30), had racial and class-based motivations. An \u00E2\u0080\u0095increasingly anti-German mood\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Behr 60) surrounding World War I made people suspicious of and hostile to German-owned breweries, while a xenophobic distaste of \u00E2\u0080\u0095whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics [...] and wine-drinking Italians\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Behr 52), among other ethnic immigrant groups, made temperance seem a desirable option for many Americans. Historian Kathleen Drowne identifies how Prohibition became for many a \u00E2\u0080\u0095highly racialized issue\u00E2\u0080\u0096: Many whites saw Prohibition as a vehicle by which they could control the behavior of intemperate blacks\u00E2\u0080\u0094a stereotype greatly strengthened by prohibition advocate D. W. Griffith\u00E2\u0080\u0098s influential 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Griffith\u00E2\u0080\u0098s film about the redemption of the Reconstruction South, which was ultimately viewed by more than fifty million Americans, portrayed black people as drunken animals and sexual beasts whose alcoholic sprees threatened to upset the social order of the entire nation. (20) In addition, temperance advocates in Great Britain and America saw drinking as \u00E2\u0080\u0095an anti-social vice\u00E2\u0080\u0096 leading to \u00E2\u0080\u0095absenteeism and instability among the working classes\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Shiman 2). Drowne adds: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Feeling threatened by the flood of immigrant populations and the \u00E2\u0080\u0097Great Migration\u00E2\u0080\u0098 of black southerners to northern industrial centers, [American] industrialists such as Henry Ford enthusiastically embraced Prohibition as a much-needed measure to control the intemperate behavior of the working classes and, at the same time, perpetuate their own white middle-class values of sobriety, economy, and thrift\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (18). 17 \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00E2\u0080\u0097alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0098 in its adjectival form (as a synonym for \u00E2\u0080\u0097drunken\u00E2\u0080\u0098) might be applied to women, but as a noun it still referred only to men\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (White 117). It is worth noting that Crowley\u00E2\u0080\u0098s observations situate us in the first half of the twentieth century: while more women were drinking in public and at home after the first World War and especially during Prohibition, the female alcoholic was still largely unnamed, existing in greater numbers and yet escaping cultural acknowledgement. Cultural historian Lori Rotskoff attributes this to the fact that over the course of U.S. history citizens have perceived excessive drinking primarily as a masculine indulgence. One continuity from the turn of the century through the 1950s rested in the perception that most heavy drinkers, and hence most alcoholics, were men. This assumption influenced the alcoholism paradigm in the 1940s and 1950s, when the term \u00E2\u0080\u0097alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0098 usually meant \u00E2\u0080\u0097male alcoholic.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 (4) Even in the medical field, where alcoholism would eventually be seen as a disease rather than a moral failing, and alcoholics as individuals to be helped rather than reviled, the female alcoholic was still eclipsed by her male counterpart. To use Rotskoff\u00E2\u0080\u0098s telling example, \u00E2\u0080\u0095in formulating his classic statement of the disease model [of alcoholism], prominent Yale scientist E. M. Jellinek assumed the alcoholic to be a man and did not employ data on women alcoholics.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Thus, even \u00E2\u0080\u0095empirical data [...] corroborated long-standing perceptions of drinking as a manly indulgence\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (67). This codification of \u00E2\u0080\u0095heavy drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0096 finds its source, according to Crowley, in the \u00E2\u0080\u0095post- Victorian reformation of gender roles\u00E2\u0080\u0096 that saw the \u00E2\u0080\u0095resurgence of a more aggressive model of \u00E2\u0080\u0097masculinity\u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00E2\u0080\u0096: \u00E2\u0080\u0095[T]he consumption of alcohol,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 he argues, \u00E2\u0080\u0095was integral to the rugged ideal of manliness that arose in reaction to the perceived enervation and \u00E2\u0080\u0097feminization\u00E2\u0080\u0098 of American life\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (28). Murdock, speaking of the late nineteenth century, confirms this: \u00E2\u0080\u0095The association of 18 masculinity with alcohol consumption, including abusive consumption, was well recognized in the era\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (15). Thus, to be a female alcoholic was to have one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s femininity, heterosexuality, and respectability called into question and destabilized, to be either sexually promiscuous or homosexual. Unlike the male alcoholic, the female alcoholic received no benefit from her relationship with alcohol; rather, she was rendered abject by it. \u00E2\u0080\u0095Indeed,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as historians Mark Lender and James Martin write, \u00E2\u0080\u0095many Americans were unprepared to see women with drinking problems as \u00E2\u0080\u0097real women\u00E2\u0080\u0098: the ideal woman was virtuous and pure; alcoholics were degraded. Women defended the home; alcoholics imperiled it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (117-118). Yet Rotskoff explains that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[w]hile the [alcoholism-as-]disease paradigm was gendered with masculine accents\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (69), female alcoholics were not entirely ignored. The problem lay in the fact that drinking was seen \u00E2\u0080\u0095as a manly activity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and that alcoholism was often used by psychiatrists as a means of diagnosing issues of gender identity (Rotskoff 69). She continues: When psychiatrists did consider female alcoholics, they applied the same rhetoric of pathology to women as they did to men. As a result they considered woman alcoholics to be especially sick: first, because they engaged in deviant behavior and, second, because that behavior was seen as a masculine neurosis. (69) Well into the twentieth century, to identify as a female alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0094even to medical professionals\u00E2\u0080\u0094was to admit to more than one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s shameful disrespectability; it was to acknowledge one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s unstable sexual identity, one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s deviance from the socially designated norms. If female alcoholics in the twentieth century were still largely inscribed by an older set of beliefs, women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking practices on the whole registered a great shift. The Women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), led by the politically- and socially- connected Pauline Sabin, \u00E2\u0080\u0095pointedly and permanently dismantled the association between 19 women and Prohibition\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Murdock 134). The WONPR rhetorically attacked the WCTU\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characterization of women as pious moral leaders and presented repeal as the modern, fashionable woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s response to Prohibition. Prohibition itself had an unintended effect: the decrease of men\u00E2\u0080\u0098s public drunkenness changed how people related to and thought about alcohol consumption and \u00E2\u0080\u0095allow[ed] for the glamorization of more restrained drinking among middle- class folk who considered themselves respectable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Rotskoff 39). The figure of the flapper\u00E2\u0080\u0094 whether or not she was as ubiquitous as retrospectives about the 20s often suggest\u00E2\u0080\u0094certainly contributed to the codification of alcohol consumption as daringly modern and appealing. Rotskoff articulates how the flapper participated in overthrowing the nineteenth century\u00E2\u0080\u0098s articulation of femininity: \u00E2\u0080\u0095The image of a fashionable lady drinking with men flagrantly opposed reformers\u00E2\u0080\u0098 depictions of a dry American womanhood victimized by drink\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (39). Murdock also credits the cocktail party with altering attitudes towards women and drink, as \u00E2\u0080\u0095[a]ssociated with conviviality, artistry, and a wealth of drink-related objects, cocktails legitimized as no other beverage could alcohol consumption within the home\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (105). While the speakeasy provided an exciting and illicit place where men and women could mingle, it was the home cocktail party that ultimately \u00E2\u0080\u0095domesticated\u00E2\u0080\u0096 alcohol, reclaiming it from the male- dominated tavern and introducing it into heterosocial company. In Great Britain, the temperance movement tells a slightly different story when it comes to alcohol consumption and gender. Shiman explains that while women were admitted to temperance societies from the late 1860s onward, their participation still constituted \u00E2\u0080\u0095the exception rather than the rule\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (182). In 1876 the British Women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Temperance Association was formed, owing in large part to the influence of American women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s temperance work. However, despite the fact that British \u00E2\u0080\u0095women teetotallers continued to be active in all areas of the local 20 and national anti-drink campaigns, the women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s organisations never became really important in the nineteenth-century temperance movement\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Shiman 187). If British women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s involvement in the temperance cause did provide them with a political voice, it didn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t quite match that of female temperance advocates working in the US (Plant and Plant 14). In other ways, however, American and British women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s experiences in relation to alcohol consumption were strikingly similar. Victorian conceptions of True Womanhood that construed woman as the passive but virtuous angel of the home were dominant in both Britain and the USA: women were either the victims of male drunkenness or wanton, predatory transgressors. Female drinkers on both sides of the Atlantic risked the same opprobrium. However, as literary scholar Jane Nardin points out, \u00E2\u0080\u0095in the United States and on the Continent, alcoholism tended to be gendered as male, while in Britain, problem drinking was often gendered female\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (49). She continues: Fears of alcohol-induced degeneracy resulted in the passage of the 1898 Habitual Inebriates Act, under which drunkards convicted of indictable offenses could be committed to inebriate reformatories for terms as long as three years. Although this provision was theoretically gender blind, in practice, eighty per cent of those committed under it were women charged with child-neglect. The others were mostly attempted suicides. Violent or neglectful fathers were never prosecuted under the act. (49) Despite the inclination to view alcoholism in Britain as primarily a woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s issue\u00E2\u0080\u0094as opposed to a man\u00E2\u0080\u0098s in America\u00E2\u0080\u0094both countries coded the drunk woman as monstrous, the most heinous possible result of drinking. 21 Many of the concerns tied to women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking in Britain date back to the eighteenth century\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095gin epidemic,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 famously illustrated by William Hogarth\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1751 prints Beer Street and Gin Lane. Beer, associated with wholesomeness and conviviality, is juxtaposed with gin, deemed a dangerous intoxicant\u00E2\u0080\u0094dangerous mainly on account of the lower classes\u00E2\u0080\u0098 consumption of it. In Hogarth\u00E2\u0080\u0098s prints, \u00E2\u0080\u0095drink and drunkenness reflect both the utopian conception of the city as the convivial hub of social and commercial life, and the dystopian conception of the city as the irrational site of swarming humanity at its most excessive and degraded\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Nicholls \u00E2\u0080\u0095Gin\u00E2\u0080\u0096 134). This degradation was best articulated\u00E2\u0080\u0094as Hogarth well knew\u00E2\u0080\u0094by the image of the drunk, neglectful mother. Daniel Defoe warns that women, \u00E2\u0080\u0095by drinking [gin], spoil their milk, and by giving it to young children, as they foolishly do, spoil the stomach, and hinder digestion; so that in less than an age, we may expect a fine spindle-shanked generation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (qtd. in Austin 300). According to rhetoric such as Defoe\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s degenerate behaviour threatened not only the welfare of their children, but the continuation of the nation. \u00E2\u0080\u0095Maid-Servants and the lower Class of Women,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 wrote one critic of the gin trade, \u00E2\u0080\u0095[who] learn the first rudiments of Gin Drinking [...] load themselves with Diseases, their Families with Poverty and their Posterity with Want and Infamy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (qtd. in Austin 314). Women, granted an increasingly participatory role in Britain\u00E2\u0080\u0098s emerging consumer society, were nonetheless judged the most harshly for engaging in what were seen as its less savoury aspects. This outraged response to the female drinker continues well into the twentieth century as evidenced by Admiral Sir Edward Evans\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1943 letter to the Home Office: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Drunken women out on the street, propositioning everyone in sight, misbehaving themselves all over the shop, throwing themselves at blokes. Leicester Square at night is the resort of the worst type of women and girls consorting with men of the British and American forces\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Plant and Plant 20). The 22 Admiral\u00E2\u0080\u0098s account treads familiar ground as once again a woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking becomes emblematic of her sexual depravity and lack of femininity. Indeed, what accounts like Evans\u00E2\u0080\u0098s make clear is the mutual exclusivity of femaleness and alcoholism in the cultural perspective: to drink is effectively to be, or to become, that which is not woman. The Modernist Drunk Narrative In these historical and discursive contexts, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that the studies of writers and alcohol cited above\u00E2\u0080\u0094with the earliest appearing in the late 70s and the latest in 2010\u00E2\u0080\u0094focus almost exclusively on male subjects; the gendering of alcoholism in both fiction and scholarship evidently persists today. The mythos of the male modernist writer, then, is discursively bound to alcoholism as a solely masculine mode of being. Yet if alcoholism inscribes the writer in this way, how does it function in the writer\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work? Crowley\u00E2\u0080\u0098s use of the term \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 designates texts that thematize and romanticize alcohol use. He writes that Malcolm Lowry believed that \u00E2\u0080\u0095the true originality of [Under the Volcano] consisted in his use of an alcoholic as a representative man, a symbol of the tragic modern condition\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (135). The protagonist of Lowry\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel, the alcoholic Consul, \u00E2\u0080\u0095[feels] himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (145); his struggle to exist in the world is as epic as it is hopeless. Nardin defines this \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as \u00E2\u0080\u0095the story of a sensitive, artistic male who heroically and freely chooses alcohol for its power both to affirm his cosmic despair and to render it bearable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (46). My question, then, is this: in what ways does a female-authored \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 conform to and depart from this vision? In Jean Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel Good Morning, Midnight, narrator Sasha Jansen thinks to herself: [I]t\u00E2\u0080\u0098s when I am quite sane like this, when I have had a couple of extra drinks and am quite sane, that I realize how lucky I am. [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] [H]ere I am, sane and dry, with 23 my place to hide in. What more do I want?...I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m a bit of an automaton, but sane, surely\u00E2\u0080\u0094dry, cold, and sane. Now I had forgotten about dark streets, dark rivers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning\u00E2\u0080\u00A6 (348) What is perhaps most striking about the passage above is Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s inversion of sobriety and drunkenness as a way of speaking about sanity: typically, to be sane, to see and think clearly, is to be sober. Yet in Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel to be sane as a woman is to be drunk. Paradoxically, drinking allows her to conform to the patriarchal order by appearing passive and docile, while enabling her to forget about the rules and obligations that necessitate her passivity, to forget \u00E2\u0080\u0095the pain, the struggle and the drowning.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 The \u00E2\u0080\u0095extra drinks\u00E2\u0080\u0096 produce Sasha both as automaton and as sane, resistant subject. This passage provides a useful point of entry as it foregrounds the female whose drinking functions as a means of knowing the world, of being sane within it. This thesis will argue that Jean Rhys, in Good Morning, Midnight, and Jane Bowles, in her novel Two Serious Ladies, both employ the figure of the drunk woman in order to articulate a female epistemology. Rhys writes Sasha as consciously and tactically performing her role as drunk woman as a means of resistance and survival. Through this role, Sasha is granted a much desired invisibility even as she becomes exceedingly visible in the form of spectacle. Moreover, drunkenness affords Sasha a penetrative vision, one that cuts through the superficialities of language and appearances to reveal the hidden, the abject, and the in-between. Bowles writes a \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 that extends to the level of narrative itself; Two Serious Ladies is an intoxicated text primarily for the way in which it represents its two female protagonists. While Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield each embark on very different quests, they do so thinking of themselves as subjects, as the heroes of their own stories, and remain 24 oblivious to patriarchal structures that would view them as other. Yet the novel is most radical\u00E2\u0080\u0094 and arguably, the most drunken\u00E2\u0080\u0094in its depiction of Miss Goering, who plays the (typically male) role of philosophical adventurer. In a text where nearly all the characters narrate their stories and philosophies, Miss Goering stands apart as one who refuses the narrative impulse, and by doing so, acknowledges the difficulties of both knowing and speaking. For most of the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, the search for meaning, the desire for purpose and identity, finds expression in narrative, which functions as a kind of closure or release. Miss Goering, in contrast, articulates\u00E2\u0080\u0094by effectively refusing to articulate\u00E2\u0080\u0094a means of inhabiting the unknown and ever- changing. By placing two women\u00E2\u0080\u0094with two very distinct ways of operating\u00E2\u0080\u0094at the centre of a novel preoccupied with themes of subjectivity and truth, Bowles makes a claim for female epistemologies, a claim which derives its power not by designating women as the privileged or sole seekers of the truth, but by simply investing them with the capacity to seek it. The drunken landscape of Two Serious Ladies re-imagines a world in which women are tasked with facing existential questions, with seeking out universal truths. Authors and Texts under Consideration Rhys scholarship has tended to read her work as autobiographical. As Carole Angier, in the introductory note to her biography of Rhys, writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095the more I learned the more I realised that [Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s] work was even more about her life, and her life even more about her work, than we already knew\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Life xi). Angier\u00E2\u0080\u0098s biography relies on Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s fiction as a means of supporting and illustrating details from her life; indeed, her life and work are treated as mutually dependent articulations of each other. Thomas Staley places a discussion of Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life \u00E2\u0080\u0095in the foreground of [his] entire study rather than treat it as background to her work\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (1); Sanford Sternlicht writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095Jean Rhys seemingly created a significant body of fiction out of her own flesh and blood\u00E2\u0080\u0096 25 (x); Peter Wolfe attests that, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Disguised and rearranged, the materials of her life pulse through her novels\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (18). Other critics look to specific incidents in Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life as keys to her literary practice: Maren Linett reads Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s protagonists as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which she links to Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s own sexual assault as an adolescent, while Mary Lou Emery examines Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s geocultural pilgrimage from the West Indies to Europe as a means of accessing her colonial identity. Moreover, in a more general sense, Heather Ingman voices the commonly expressed view that there \u00E2\u0080\u0095is a quality of interchangeability between Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s heroines which invites us to deal with her novels as a continuum rather than treating them as separate works; indeed it can be argued that Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s heroines represent different stages in the life of the same woman\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (108). This \u00E2\u0080\u0095woman,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Ingman later implies, can easily be read as Rhys herself since these narratives are ultimately \u00E2\u0080\u0095her own story\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (121). It\u00E2\u0080\u0098s curious, then, that despite this autobiographical tendency in Rhys criticism, little critical attention has been paid to the role of alcohol consumption in her work, since her letters and biographies\u00E2\u0080\u0094not to mention her fiction itself\u00E2\u0080\u0094are replete with references to drink. Her letters are marked by casual references to drinking, an example of which has her noting to a friend that she spends \u00E2\u0080\u0095[o]ne day drunk, two days h[u]ngover regular as clockwork,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and later writing to that same friend that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[t]his has been written with the aid of whiskey as you doubtless guess\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Letters 159, 227). More striking, however, is when alcohol asserts itself in more overt ways, as when Rhys offers a rare account of her writing philosophy: I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod 26 along line upon line. Then there\u00E2\u0080\u0098s a drink of course which is awfully handy. Or drinks. (Letters 103) Rhys names drink as an obvious accompaniment to her writing life, seeing it as a \u00E2\u0080\u0095handy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 tool that assists with her literary production as well as her day-to-day living; being \u00E2\u0080\u0095used\u00E2\u0080\u0096 by writing is made easier by drinking. Drinking, here, is accorded with some importance; while not quite on par with \u00E2\u0080\u0095Writing,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 it is nonetheless not far beneath it. Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s relationship with alcohol is also made explicit in biographical accounts of her life. Poet and novelist Alexis Lykiard, in a memoir devoted to his friendship with Rhys, writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[d]rink was just something Jean was used to, something she needed\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (140), while novelist David Plante suggests that Rhys \u00E2\u0080\u0095imagine[d] she survive[d] on drink\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (154). Unlike the biographers and critics Dardis names in his study who harbour \u00E2\u0080\u0095a curious unwillingness [...] to deal openly with alcoholic writers\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (6), Angier, for her part, never shies away from acknowledging Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s alcoholism, pronouncing that \u00E2\u0080\u0095the twin necessities of her [...] life\u00E2\u0080\u0096 were \u00E2\u0080\u0095writing and drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Life 236). Angier\u00E2\u0080\u0098s biography chronicles, with considerable empathy, Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s addiction to alcohol, as well as the violence and despair facilitated by that addiction. Rhys battered her husbands, assaulted her neighbours on several occasions, and frequently gave in to uncontrollable rages, behaviour which perhaps accounts for the (relative) critical silence regarding this aspect of her life: in her novels, Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s protagonists, when drunk, are outwardly passive, weak, the victims\u00E2\u0080\u0094not the perpetrators\u00E2\u0080\u0094of cruelty. Good Morning, Midnight\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Sasha comes closest to violence in her fantasy directed at a hostile cafe patron, \u00E2\u0080\u0095One day, quite suddenly, when you\u00E2\u0080\u0098re not expecting it, I\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (375). Yet the reality of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s situation is that the fellow customer renders her passive and unable to speak. In Quartet, Marya Zelli, in a desperate 27 moment, threatens to kill her lover\u00E2\u0080\u0098s wife, saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095kill her, d\u00E2\u0080\u0098you see? Get my hands round her thick throat and squeeze\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (198) and yet this threat soon devolves into her speaking in \u00E2\u0080\u0095a little voice like a child,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0095quivering and abject in [Heidler\u00E2\u0080\u0098s] arms, like some unfortunate dog abasing itself before its master\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (198, 199). The drinking woman in Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s fiction never attains the outward manifestation of violence that was occasionally exemplified in her own life. Still, Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s literary work prominently features female protagonists who drink, and frequently and heavily at that. In reference to Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s interwar novels,9 addiction studies scholar George Wedge claims that \u00E2\u0080\u0095forty-two percent of their pages contain at least one reference to alcohol\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (27 qtd. in Nardin 48). Her protagonists spend their days, in various European cities, idling in cafes, ordering drinks, and having drinks ordered for them. Yet alcohol consumption in Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work remains largely unexamined in the criticism, with the exception of a few pioneering critical forays which inform my discussion. 10 Critical accounts of Jane Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work have similarly skewed toward the biographical. However, the biographical is generally employed differently when it comes to Bowles: while Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life and work are frequently conflated\u00E2\u0080\u0094\u00E2\u0080\u0095the \u00E2\u0080\u0097Rhys woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098 is Jean Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0096\u00E2\u0080\u0094Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s fiction appears to bear a more enigmatic relationship to her life. Biographer Millicent Dillon writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095Two Serious Ladies is an autobiographical novel, but not in the confessional sense. [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] It is autobiographical, rather, in that in every moment of the novel Jane is present in each of her characters\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Little 99). Perhaps this level of autobiography is at work for most writers; suffice it to say that while Dillon points out biographical details that correspond to Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 9 These include Quartet (1928), under the title Postures; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930); Voyage in the Dark (1934); and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, appeared nearly three decades after Midnight in 1966. 10 See Jane Nardin\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00E2\u0080\u0097As Soon As I Sober Up I Start Again\u00E2\u0080\u0098: Alcohol and the Will in Jean Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Pre-War Novels\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and James Nicholls\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095Drink, Modernity and Modernism: Representations of Drinking and Intoxication in James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 28 work in her biography A Little Original Sin, there is no one character in Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s oeuvre that critics and readers have equated with her. Perhaps this owes to Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s markedly odd characters, which are not sketched according to the dictates of realism but follow instead the logic of the comically absurd. When the biographical enters into Bowles scholarship, however, it is typically in order to address her legend. If some critics read Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life according to the \u00E2\u0080\u0095information\u00E2\u0080\u0096 offered by her texts, then there are also those who read Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work through the lens of her life. Jennie Skerl characterizes Bowles as \u00E2\u0080\u0095a writer whose career follows a familiar trajectory for women experimentalists: a brilliant debut with a seminal work that garners the praise of other writers (her novel, Two Serious Ladies), a lack of continuing critical attention and understanding, a decline in productivity, a critical \u00E2\u0080\u0097forgetting,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 then a revival or series of revivals.\u00E2\u0080\u009611 She writes that Bowles criticism tends to fixate on \u00E2\u0080\u0095three interrelated legends\u00E2\u0080\u0096: \u00E2\u0080\u0095the bohemian legend of artistic genius, the legend of self-destruction, and the legend of the glamorous couple\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (\u00E2\u0080\u0095Legend\u00E2\u0080\u0096 262). Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s heavy drinking might have been expected to elicit some critical attention in terms of these legends and consequently her work, yet this hasn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t been the case. Dillon\u00E2\u0080\u0098s biography makes frequent mention of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drinking, noting that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[w]hen she wasn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t working, she was drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (96). Her husband Paul\u00E2\u0080\u0098s worrying about her drinking, his warnings to her\u00E2\u0080\u0094\u00E2\u0080\u0095You\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll ruin your health [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] Nobody can drink that much\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (80)\u00E2\u0080\u0094become a familiar refrain in the book. In a letter to her friend Miriam Levy, Bowles wrote, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I shall now go and drink myself to death for a few hours \u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (37). Drinking, Dillon\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work suggests, was a large part of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life. One friend recounts that \u00E2\u0080\u0095Jane drank a lot but was never really an alcoholic. There was no drinking early in the day, but the cocktail hour was sacred. Whatever 11 In many ways, this trajectory was Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, too. Her rediscovery by Selma Vaz Dias and Francis Wyndham, however, led to the writing and publication of her most renowned work, Wide Sargasso Sea. 29 was cooked had to be something that could be kept indefinitely while the cocktail hour stretched on and on. Often Jane had so much to drink that she wasn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t capable of eating at all\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (115). Another says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Yes, she drank a lot, but she wasn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t a drunk. She would say, \u00E2\u0080\u0097I sleep where I drink.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 She would fall asleep on the couch after drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (125). These accounts, while ostensibly speaking to Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s not having a drinking problem, appear only to confirm the opposite. More interesting, however, is the apparent unease with which her friends speak about excessive drinking, categorically dismissing the words \u00E2\u0080\u0095alcoholic\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 An example of an article that does mention alcoholism in Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work is by writer Edouard Roditi, an acquaintance of hers. He writes: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Alcoholism appears [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] to be one of the weaknesses of Christina Goering and Mrs. Quill. Like Mrs. Copperfield, they both have recourse to great quantities of gin in moments of indecision or of stress, much as [Bowles] too had recourse to alcohol in real life\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (188). What Roditi offers here, while accurate, is an observation that acknowledges Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s alcoholism, but does so as an aside, in a way that seems to close off any opportunity for further discussion. By outlining the critical response (both literary and biographical) to Rhys and Bowles, my goal has been to identify existing gaps in the scholarship, while pointing to areas deserving of further research. Calling for an \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00C3\u00A9criture alcoolique\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (709), Vice offers a playful variation on H\u00C3\u00A9l\u00C3\u00A8ne Cixous\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00C3\u00A9criture feminine\u00E2\u0080\u0096; in echoing this call, I want to suggest that \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00C3\u00A9criture alcoolique,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as a discourse, retain, in some capacity, the concerns of its namesake. In other words, while exploring the drunk narrative, let us also consider other, non-dominant, incarnations of that narrative, specifically those written by and about women. 30 2 \u00E2\u0080\u009CA Guileful Ruse\u00E2\u0080\u009D: Female Drunkenness as Masquerade in Jean Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Good Morning, Midnight Good Morning, Midnight begins where it ends: in a hotel room in Paris. Sasha, an \u00E2\u0080\u0095Anglaise\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in her forties, has arrived after years away in England where she had spent her days \u00E2\u0080\u0095trying to drink [her]self to death\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (363). Her stay in Paris, made possible by a concerned friend, is where she hopes to make her \u00E2\u0080\u0095transformation act\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (383), to become \u00E2\u0080\u0095une femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (411)\u00E2\u0080\u0094respectable, suitable, but above all, invisible. Accustomed to her outsider status, to internalizing the looks of others that call her \u00E2\u0080\u0095the stranger, the alien, the old one\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (376), Sasha simply hopes to achieve in her appearance a neutrality, or normalcy, that will/can shield her from prying eyes. As Mary Lou Emery puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Sasha attempts desperately to wear with success the masks that she believes others will perceive as respectable femininity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (4-5). Modernist scholar Christina Britzolakis echoes this assertion: \u00E2\u0080\u0095For Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s women, the masquerade of femininity provides, via cosmetics and fashion, a form of protective/aggressive anonymity within a public space characterized by the hostile gaze of others\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (462). The terms \u00E2\u0080\u0095mask\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095masquerade\u00E2\u0080\u0096 are apt as Sasha self-consciously recognizes both her need for disguise as a means of survival and her ultimate remove from the kind of stable, homogeneous identity performed by these masks. Yet the mask of femininity identified by Emery and Britzolakis is but one of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s masks. She wears it to fend off those who, by their glances or words, would reduce her, find her ridiculous, see her as spectacle. But as Sasha readily acknowledges throughout the novel, she often fails to wear this mask successfully, to ape the part of a contented, bourgeois woman who, if not marked by her beauty and youth, is not entirely lacking in them. When she says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Besides, it isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t my face, this tortured and tormented mask. I can take it off whenever I like and hang it up 31 on a nail\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (369-370), she is gesturing to the mask of the woman trying to drink herself to death. And when she continues, by asking, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Or shall I place on it a tall hat with a green feather, hang a veil over the lot, and walk about the dark streets so merrily?\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (370), she is speaking to her incarnation as the woman become spectacle. While recognizing that all Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s poses are effectively born of desperation and defeat, I contend that Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s failure to pose as \u00E2\u0080\u0095une femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 gives way to yet another pose: that of the drunk woman. This pose, inevitably no more liberating than the last, is nonetheless employed tactically as a mode of survival and affords Sasha a certain measure of invisibility just as it cements her position as spectacle. To play the respectable woman is to live by certain rules and codes, to inhabit certain places, to stick to a regimented programme. To play the drunken woman is to transgress these rules and yet appear, as passive automaton, to be following them only too well. That Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s recovery narrative is predicated on rules\u00E2\u0080\u0094rules she associates with \u00E2\u0080\u0095la femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and bourgeois respectability\u00E2\u0080\u0094is apparent from the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s first page. Her vacation in Paris is enacted in terms very unlike a vacation, with her announcement of a strictly controlled plan to pass the time: \u00E2\u0080\u0095I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (347). This assertion, however, is followed by the memory of the night before, when the plan failed and Sasha ended up crying in the bar\u00E2\u0080\u0098s washroom. Even with this plan, Sasha recognizes that her grasp on the character she aspires to play is a fragile one. Still, she persists in trying, as her programme for monotonous but safe living reappears again and again in the novel: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Planning it all out. Eating. A movie. Eating again. One drink. A long walk back to the hotel. Bed. Luminal. Sleep. Just sleep\u00E2\u0080\u0094no dreams\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (351). This refrain in service of respectability effectively transforms Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s leisure time into, as literary critic Rachel Bowlby puts it: 32 the form of the prescribed timetable of the office or factory worker going through a regular standardised sequence. Putting these two modes on the same plan or plane ruins the comfortable differentiation according to which the two are diametrically opposed, pleasure on one side and obligation on the other, time that is yours to spend and time that does not belong to you. Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s extreme case, abolishing the difference by treating leisure as time to be managed, transforms freedom into the terror of a loss of control or an unforeseen incursion from the outside. The plan is a defence and it is all there is. (40-41) Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s stay in Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0094her patronage of bars, cafes, and shops\u00E2\u0080\u0094is carried out defensively. Her experience of the city stands in contrast to that typically held to be the expatriate\u00E2\u0080\u0098s\u00E2\u0080\u0094an experience involving pleasure, discovery, consumption; Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s consumer practices simply function as ways of getting by. Unlike the tourist for whom Sasha once worked as an American Express guide, who demands to be taken to \u00E2\u0080\u0095the place where they sell that German camera which can\u00E2\u0080\u0098t be got anywhere else outside Germany\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095the place where she can buy a hat which will \u00C3\u00A9pater everybody she knows\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (361), Sasha employs none of the usual phrases and markers of the tourist navigating Paris. While she occasionally names them, the restaurants, bars, and cafes Sasha frequents are stripped of their singularity. An exception to this rule is Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s naming of the D\u00C3\u00B4me cafe, which she marks as singular only insofar as it has negative connotations for her. As one of Montparnasse\u00E2\u0080\u0098s most renowned cafes, with its large clientele of Anglo-American expatriates and its established role as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, the D\u00C3\u00B4me presents a particularly daunting cafe experience for Sasha. One moment in the novel has Sasha feeling a rare desire for music and people, and she wonders where to go, saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Not the D\u00C3\u00B4me. 33 I\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll avoid the damned D\u00C3\u00B4me. And, of course, it\u00E2\u0080\u0098s the D\u00C3\u00B4me that I go to\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (388). Nicholls reads Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s protagonists\u00E2\u0080\u0098 exclusion as one specific to \u00E2\u0080\u0095the mythically idealised drinking culture of modernist Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Drink 269). Unlike Marya in Quartet, ensnared by Heidler and Lois and their coterie of artists, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s only exposure to such a milieu is through the painter Serge Rubin, who, as a Jewish foreigner, is himself an outsider. Still, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s experience of the Left Bank is far removed from \u00E2\u0080\u0095the setting of an exciting literary revolution,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and instead \u00E2\u0080\u0095represent[s] [the] exhausting and degrading efforts to provide the necessities of survival\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Benstock 449). Her pragmatic rendering of the city has her describing the \u00E2\u0080\u0095two caf\u00C3\u00A9s opposite each other in this street near my hotel\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as \u00E2\u0080\u0095the one where the proprietor is hostile\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095the one where the proprietor is neutral\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (371). Grounded as it is in the fear of being ridiculed and made spectacle, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s mapping of the city follows a different logic than that of the (typically bourgeois, male) tourist. This rewriting of the city in psychological and emotional terms finds Sasha designating cafes as safe or unsafe, marking restaurants for their \u00E2\u0080\u0095familiar\u00E2\u0080\u0096 washrooms, their neutral staff. She explains: My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of caf\u00C3\u00A9s where they like me and caf\u00C3\u00A9s where they don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren\u00E2\u0080\u0098t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won\u00E2\u0080\u0098t, and so on. (371) Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s assessment appears to place the hostilities of others and the perceived unluckiness of a dress on the same plane, as if all her troubles were simply the products of a psychological quirk. 34 However, this would be to ignore the complex socio-economic and gendered conditions that underlie Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095complicated affair\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of a life. This is nicely illustrated by Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s account of a kitten she once encountered in London\u00E2\u0080\u0094thin and sickly\u00E2\u0080\u0094that she shooed from her flat, only to hear later that it had been run over. Sasha describes the kitten as having had \u00E2\u0080\u0095an inferiority complex and persecution mania and nostalgie de la boue and all the rest\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (377), but it soon becomes clear that she is also, perhaps predominantly, describing herself. The kitten is targeted by the male cats of the neighbourhood, develops a sore on her neck, is called \u00E2\u0080\u0095disgusting\u00E2\u0080\u0096 by her owners, and is eventually run over by what Sasha calls a \u00E2\u0080\u0095merciful taxi\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (377). Like the kitten, Sasha possesses an unhealthy \u00E2\u0080\u0095persecution mania\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and inhabits a world in which she is routinely persecuted and othered. Bowlby writes of the difficulty in deciding whether Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095heroines\u00E2\u0080\u0098 troubles are supposed to be caused by this or by that, by men, or madness, or the commodification of women in modern capitalism\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (34). I would suggest that this causal indeterminacy is Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s way of speaking to the complex negotiations of oppression, her way of recognizing that \u00E2\u0080\u0095capitalist and patriarchal values are inseparable, [with] each supporting the other in a parasitical economy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Benstock 440). Moreover, by refusing to provide a clear-cut reason why Sasha is the way she is, Rhys depicts the modern subject as inextricably implicated in the networks that oppress her. As Emery writes, it is the play of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s many disguises, \u00E2\u0080\u0095rather than a discovery of authentic selfhood, [that] shapes the narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (11). In other words, rather than search for an autonomous self that precedes or transcends Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s place \u00E2\u0080\u0095on the extreme edge of multiple axes of exclusion\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Linett 437-438), we might consider instead how she responds to being situated there. 35 Tactics Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s particular mode of navigating Paris can be understood in terms of Michel de Certeau\u00E2\u0080\u0098s theory of tactics and consumer \u00E2\u0080\u0095ways of operating,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which \u00E2\u0080\u0095constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (xiv-xv). Interested in \u00E2\u0080\u0095the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of \u00E2\u0080\u0097discipline,\u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00E2\u0080\u0096 de Certeau focuses on the consumer as everyman, granting him or her a certain measure of agency in the face of Foucauldian systems of surveillance, discipline, and organization. He differentiates between \u00E2\u0080\u0095strategies\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095tactics,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 defining the former as such: I call a \u00E2\u0080\u0095strategy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 the calculus of force\u00E2\u0080\u0094relationships which become possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an \u00E2\u0080\u0095environment.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serves as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, \u00E2\u0080\u0095client\u00C3\u00A8les,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0095targets,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 or \u00E2\u0080\u0095objects\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been construed on this strategic model. (xix) Strategies, deployed systematically, are the province of the powerful. Good Morning, Midnight, set against the backdrop of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques with its competing Nazi and Communist pavilions, gestures to a world dominated by competing power relations. On a smaller scale, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s quotidian existence is mediated by the strategic operations of those more powerful than her, from the patron of the hotel who demands to see her passport, to the hostile cafe proprietors, to the frightening \u00E2\u0080\u0095commis voyageur\u00E2\u0080\u0096 next door. 36 If strategies are the operations of \u00E2\u0080\u0095technocratic structures\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (xiv-xv), of authority figures, then tactics, on the other hand, consist of \u00E2\u0080\u0095an art of the weak\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (de Certeau 37): The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuvre \u00E2\u0080\u0095within the enemy\u00E2\u0080\u0098s field of vision,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as von B\u00C3\u00BClow put it, and within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a distinct, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. (de Certeau 37) In de Certeau\u00E2\u0080\u0098s formulation, tactics provide the consumer with a way of living under \u00E2\u0080\u0095the law of a foreign power,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in a manner that \u00E2\u0080\u0095establishes [...] a degree of plurality and creativity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (30; original emphasis). Tactical \u00E2\u0080\u0095ways of using\u00E2\u0080\u0096 are made visible in the sense that they occur \u00E2\u0080\u0095within the enemy\u00E2\u0080\u0098s field of vision,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 yet inherent to that visibility is the possibility that what is being seen is a false show, a masquerade, a ruse. The tactic \u00E2\u0080\u0095must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (37). In a novel that \u00E2\u0080\u0095thematically stresses the importance of exhibitions and appearances, of looking and displaying,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Sasha \u00E2\u0080\u0095is constantly anxious and aware of being seen as an outsider, a foreigner, an old woman, a rich woman\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Camarasana 63). She fears being looked at, yet finds herself the object of other people\u00E2\u0080\u0098s stares throughout the novel. How, then, does she live under these scopic conditions? How and in what forms does she articulate her \u00E2\u0080\u0095art of the weak\u00E2\u0080\u0096? With these questions I turn to the next section. 37 Sasha as Spectacle In discussing Quartet, literary scholar Richard E. Zeikowitz argues that Rhys \u00E2\u0080\u0095does not merely \u00E2\u0080\u0097translate\u00E2\u0080\u0098 Marya\u00E2\u0080\u0098s internalized experience of Paris; rather, she articulates the process by which Marya constructs her own Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0094one at odds with the ordered, stable, masculine city that oppresses her\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (1). Zeikowitz\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work, also drawing on de Certeau in his essay \u00E2\u0080\u0095Walking in the City,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 outlines how Marya enacts a spatial rewriting of Paris. My reading of Good Morning, Midnight shares an affinity with this line of inquiry but focuses on the female fl\u00C3\u00A2neur, not as walker, but as spectacle. Of course, the terms \u00E2\u0080\u0095fl\u00C3\u00A2neur\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095spectacle\u00E2\u0080\u0096 are discursively gendered and nearly oxymoronic when joined together. As cultural historian Deborah L. Parsons writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095The urban observer, as both a social phenomenon and a metaphor for the modernist artist, has been regarded as an exclusively male figure\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (4). Critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss adds that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[p]rostitution was indeed the female version of flanerie\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (119). While both Parsons and Buck-Morss are writing of a historically situated fl\u00C3\u00A2neur\u00E2\u0080\u0094one deriving from Walter Benjamin\u00E2\u0080\u0098s study of nineteenth-century Paris\u00E2\u0080\u0094the term has largely retained these connotations of bourgeois masculinity well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In recent years, however, the term has undergone discursive shifts that register the fl\u00C3\u00A2neur as \u00E2\u0080\u0095an increasingly expansive figure who represents a variety of \u00E2\u0080\u0097wanderings,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 in terms of ambulation, nationality, gender, race, class, and sexuality\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Parsons 4). My discussion relies on the older formulation of the fl\u00C3\u00A2neur only because, within the context of Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha decidedly cannot be called a fl\u00C3\u00A2neuse: she walks the urban landscape and yet derives little pleasure from it; she inhabits the role of outsider too fully to claim ownership of the street; and she is observed more than she observes. This last point is because \u00E2\u0080\u0095[w]omen were excluded from the privileged 38 standing of spectator, with its attendant visual pleasures and uncurtailed mobility, along the gendered divide of scopic relations, namely that men look and women appear\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Conor 18). Part of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s history of \u00E2\u0080\u0095appearing\u00E2\u0080\u0096 includes her being seen or mistaken for the other figure in the street: the prostitute. Buck-Morss continues: \u00E2\u0080\u0095The flaneur was simply the name of a man who loitered; but all women who loitered risked being seen as whores\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (119). Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s earlier novels all feature protagonists who maintain ambiguous relationships to the commodification of their sexuality; Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s flashbacks to her past place her in this category as well. However, she is now, or imagines herself to be, perceived as \u00E2\u0080\u0095la vieille\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (378), a woman long past the age of sexual desirability. Yet if the ageing Sasha no longer occupies her former position as sexual commodity when walking in the street, she is also not granted the role of sexual appraiser. Interestingly, despite Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s attempts to look respectable and neither old nor rich, she attracts the attentions of a gigolo named Ren\u00C3\u00A9. She thinks to herself, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Oh Lord, is that what I look like? Do I really look like a wealthy dame trotting round Montparnasse in the hope of --? After all the trouble I\u00E2\u0080\u0098ve gone to, is that what I look like? I suppose I do\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (389). For the first time, she records not caring \u00E2\u0080\u0095what the man thinks of me\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and notices he \u00E2\u0080\u0095isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t trying to size me up, as they usually do\u00E2\u0080\u0094he is exhibiting himself, his own person\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (389). Yet as the ending of the novel makes clear, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s age and gifted fur coat do not enable a shift in her sexual agency, as even in the company of a gigolo her desires are ignored. Ren\u00C3\u00A9 tells her, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I knew you wanted me to come up\u00E2\u0080\u0094yes. That was easy to see\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (455), and proceeds to nearly rape her. Ultimately, Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s sexuality makes her a spectacle, with Ren\u00C3\u00A9 saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I want to see this comedy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (455). The comedy for Ren\u00C3\u00A9 lies in the idea of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s trying to throw him out, yelling \u00E2\u0080\u0095[a]u secours, au secours\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (455) and making a scene, but also, it is implied, in the show or spectacle of the older woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s sexuality. A spectacle, typically gendered as female, involves \u00E2\u0080\u0095a kind of inadvertency and loss of 39 boundaries\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Russo 54). Ren\u00C3\u00A9 accuses Sasha of \u00E2\u0080\u0095playing a comedy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (455), of acting in opposition to her sexual desires, but the very existence of those desires makes her appear ridiculous and grotesque, a comedy that is watched by the male spectator. Ren\u00C3\u00A9 wants to \u00E2\u0080\u0095see this comedy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (my emphasis). Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s attempts to adhere to her programme\u00E2\u0080\u0094\u00E2\u0080\u0095Eat. Drink. Walk. March.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (433)\u00E2\u0080\u0094are carried out in the name of surviving the city\u00E2\u0080\u0098s visual scene, of escaping the looks of others by appearing respectable. Sasha, no longer \u00E2\u0080\u0095wish[ing] to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 simply wishes \u00E2\u0080\u0095to be left alone\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (369). She tactically chooses which restaurant or cafe to go to; \u00E2\u0080\u0095I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t see why I shouldn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t revisit [the Pig and Lily],\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she says at one point, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I have never made scenes there, collapsed, cried\u00E2\u0080\u0094so far as I know I have a perfectly clean slate\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (367). That \u00E2\u0080\u0095clean slate,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 we are made to understand, is not exactly common with Sasha. \u00E2\u0080\u0095The thing is to have a programme,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she reiterates, \u00E2\u0080\u0095not to leave anything to chance\u00E2\u0080\u0094no gaps. [...] Above all, no crying in public, no crying at all if I can help it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (351). Yet what happens when Sasha cries, when she makes a scene? When she fails in her ultimate goal of appearing respectable? Sasha gives in to her pose as a drunk. Paradoxically, she achieves the invisibility she is after by becoming super- visible, a spectacle, a drunk woman. This transition from \u00E2\u0080\u0095femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to drunk is made legible when Sasha visits a tabac on her own. Immediately, she registers the hostility of others and the way she is being looked at, thinking, \u00E2\u0080\u0095The woman at the bar gives me one of those looks: What do you want here, you? We don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t cater for tourists here, not our client\u00C3\u00A8le...Well, dear madame, to tell you the truth, what I want here is a drink\u00E2\u0080\u0094I rather think two, perhaps three\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (408). Sasha interprets the woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s look\u00E2\u0080\u0094a look that codes her as undesirable, if respectable\u00E2\u0080\u0094and responds aggressively (and internally) with her unrespectable intention to drink. \u00E2\u0080\u0095Never mind,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Sasha says to herself, 40 \u00E2\u0080\u0095here I am and here I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m going to stay\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (409). Yet she soon feels the need to justify her behaviour and presence to the wait staff, as she often does in the establishments she frequents. Nicholls characterizes Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s depiction of the bar as \u00E2\u0080\u0095a space in which surveillance, observation and regulation are inscribed in both the physical structure and the hierarchical networks of specularity which are at work within it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Drink 264). The mirrors lining the bar and cafe walls work to reproduce the stares of the customers and wait staff, as well as reflect Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s sense of herself as visual oddity; able to see what they see, she is more convinced of her status as other. In the tabac, Sasha pays the waiter and asks him \u00E2\u0080\u0095the way to the nearest cinema.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 She explains: \u00E2\u0080\u0095This, of course, arises from a cringing desire to explain my presence in the place. I only came in here to inquire the way to the nearest cinema. I am a respectable woman, une femme convenable, on her way to the nearest cinema\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (409). Having successfully convinced the waiter she is the \u00E2\u0080\u0095respectable woman\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of her refrain, Sasha orders another Pernod; with that action, however, she signals that she has ceased to be that woman: Now the feeling of the room is different. They all know what I am. I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m a woman come in here to get drunk. That happens sometimes. They have a drink, these women, and then they have another and then they start crying silently. And then they go into the lavabo and then they come out\u00E2\u0080\u0094powdered, but with hollow eyes\u00E2\u0080\u0094 and, head down, slink into the street. [...] That\u00E2\u0080\u0098s it, ch\u00C3\u00A8re madame, I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m drunk. I have drunk. There\u00E2\u0080\u0098s nothing to be done about it now. I have drunk. But otherwise quiet, fearful, tamed, prepared to give big tips. (I\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll give a big tip if you\u00E2\u0080\u0098ll leave me alone.) Bon, bien, bien, bon... (410) Her addiction exposed, her respectability shown to be but a mask, Sasha acknowledges her breach of socially acceptable behaviour. \u00E2\u0080\u0095I have drunk,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she says, as if to say, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I have sinned.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 41 With only one extra drink, Sasha becomes one of \u00E2\u0080\u0095these women,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 a type with recognizable patterns of operating, with a recognizable look. Significantly, the designation and classification of this type\u00E2\u0080\u0094at least for the bartender and waiter\u00E2\u0080\u0094occur along purely visual lines: there is no need to access Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s interiority, or ascribe her motives that go beyond wanting to drink and drink more. In The Spectacular Modern Woman, Conor argues that the early twentieth century\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095visually intensified scene provided new conditions for the feminine subject\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (7). In Conor\u00E2\u0080\u0098s discussion, a woman\u00E2\u0080\u0098s becoming spectacle is a potentially empowering means of articulating her subjectivity. She writes: To appear within [this visual scene] was to literally make a spectacle of oneself, to configure oneself as spectacle, to apprehend oneself and be apprehended as image. [...] \u00E2\u0080\u0097Appearing\u00E2\u0080\u0098 describes how the changed conditions of feminine visibility in modernity invited a practice of the self which was centered on one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s visual status and effects. (7) Conor sees \u00E2\u0080\u0095types\u00E2\u0080\u0096 such as the \u00E2\u0080\u0095City Girl, Office Girl, Business Girl, Factory Girl, and the more morally dubious Flapper and Amateur\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as achieving an articulation of self through visual means. Yet her use of \u00E2\u0080\u0095spectacle\u00E2\u0080\u0096 carries with it none of the negatively gendered connotations usually associated with the word and she thus ignores the other \u00E2\u0080\u0095types\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of women existing in the visual scene: the hag, the prostitute, the drunk woman. Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s short story \u00E2\u0080\u0095Mannequin\u00E2\u0080\u0096 includes a taxonomy of women similar to Conor\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, listing off \u00E2\u0080\u0095the gamine,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0095the femme fatale,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095the gar\u00C3\u00A7onne\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Collected 22-23) as types of feminine appearing. However, Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s description of the models emphasizes the performative nature of playing to type: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Each of the twelve was a distinct and separate type: each of the twelve knew her type and kept to it, practising rigidly in clothing, 42 manner, voice and conversation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (22). For Rhys, even the privileged members of the visual scene, the young and beautiful, are performing in ways that are \u00E2\u0080\u0095rigid\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and constraining. Still, Conor\u00E2\u0080\u0098s and Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s projects aren\u00E2\u0080\u0098t completely at odds: if Conor is writing against the view that women are completely limited by their cultural constitution as image and object, then Rhys is similarly invested in exploring her protagonist\u00E2\u0080\u0098s moments of agency and instances of retaliation. Instead of arguing for the agency of the \u00E2\u0080\u0095young, slender, attractive, and white\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (30) group of women that populate Conor\u00E2\u0080\u0098s discussion, however, Rhys asks what it means to perform the grotesque, the irrevocably othered. She extends the complexities of female performance to roles not generally seen as performance: the drunk, for example, is assumed to be in a powerless position that offers little room for empowerment or tactical decision-making. Furthermore, the drunk is defined by her addiction, her degradation, in ways that preclude her from performing at all: unlike the gamine of Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story who plays to her type, the drunk is typically held to be her addiction. She is framed in ways that deny her the ability to see outside of her culturally constructed role as drunk. Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s depiction of Sasha counters this view: her portrait of Sasha is of a woman who reflexively recognizes her role and is able to manipulate and work within its discursive constraints. This is not to say that Sasha isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t an alcoholic, or that she\u00E2\u0080\u0098s merely playing a role in getting drunk, but it is to explore what Sasha does with the role of drunk woman and to ask what it affords her in terms of her scopic survival in the city. Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s transformation into a drunk woman in the tabac is done consciously. When the tenuous pose of respectability is undone by the ordering of her second Pernod, she has no choice but to inhabit the pose of a drunk; this posing is her \u00E2\u0080\u0095art of the weak.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 De Certeau identifies deception and disguise as two of the advantages of the weak since 43 [t]he more a power grows, the less it can allow itself to mobilize part of its means in the service of deception: it is dangerous to deploy large forces for the sake of appearances [...] One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a \u00E2\u0080\u0095last resort\u00E2\u0080\u0096... (37) Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s masquerade is necessitated by desperate circumstances: when she relinquishes the mask of respectability, she wears the mask of drunkenness as a \u00E2\u0080\u0095last resort.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Her transformation takes place in public, out in the open, in enemy territory. Her pose lies not in her being drunk\u00E2\u0080\u0094she is or will be soon\u00E2\u0080\u0094but in the way she inhabits the discursive category of drunk woman. That category carries with it an excess of connotations, of which Sasha is aware, that characterize her as passive, sexually promiscuous, hysterical, degraded, and mad. Yet just as she becomes a spectacle in this role\u00E2\u0080\u0094marring the visual scene of bourgeois cafe culture with her drunkenness, her sadness and hollow eyes\u00E2\u0080\u0094she paradoxically becomes invisible; she is seen, but only insofar as sight becomes a means of dismissal. The social response to the drunk woman is revulsion and disgust, but this response trades in abstractions rather than specifics: the drunk woman repels because she represents a challenge to or disruption of ideals of femininity and middle-class propriety. Sasha as individual is eclipsed by Sasha as drunk woman; eliciting the stares and judgment of others, she is at the same time rendered invisible. Sasha engages in \u00E2\u0080\u0095trickery\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in two ways: the first lies in her pose as a drunk woman, and the second lies in the very act of her posing. In terms of the former, Sasha appears as the \u00E2\u0080\u0095compliant female automaton\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Felski 20) of patriarchal fantasy: rendered silent, mute, she assumes an outward passivity. Psychoanalyst Joan Riviere\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 1929 essay \u00E2\u0080\u0095Womanliness as Masquerade\u00E2\u0080\u0096 contains a useful analogy here, as she reads woman as performing her femininity 44 \u00E2\u0080\u0095both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (94). One of Riviere\u00E2\u0080\u0098s case studies is of a professional woman, adept in her field, who must flirt with her male audience members at the end of her talk in order to delegitimize the claims to masculine authority presented by it. Similarly, when Sasha assumes the role of drunk woman, she is relying on appearing passive in order to hide the radical resistance offered by her narrative. The label of passive drunk woman is a guise that allows for Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s active, narrative inhabitation of the role. Dolls, mannequins, and machines are recurring images in Good Morning, Midnight, gesturing, perhaps, to patriarchally licensed forms of feminine appearing. Thinking back to her job in a dress shop, Sasha says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart\u00E2\u0080\u0094all complete\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (353). The dolls would make \u00E2\u0080\u0095successful\u00E2\u0080\u0096 women not only on account of their idealized physical features, but also, principally, for being dolls\u00E2\u0080\u0094silent, unthinking, and unfeeling. Sasha admits that she\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095a bit of an automaton\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (348) who\u00E2\u0080\u0098s been \u00E2\u0080\u0095made very passive\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (349), yet her recognition of this signals that she has not entirely succumbed to her oppression, not yet \u00E2\u0080\u0095succeeded\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as the dolls have. Nardin, taking up \u00E2\u0080\u0095the claim of recent feminists that women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s addictions can be seen as symptoms of patriarchal oppression or as protests against it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (46), views Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s depictions of alcoholic women as \u00E2\u0080\u0095a proto-feminist alternative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to Crowley\u00E2\u0080\u0098s formulation of the modernist drunk narrative. She writes that the \u00E2\u0080\u0095novels suggest that women drinkers might choose addiction and refuse a recovery that would only return them to the predicament against which they were protesting in the first place\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (46).12 Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s getting drunk 12 Film scholar Melissa Pearl Friedling cautions against approaches in this vein that valorize women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095addictions as liberatory rhetorics\u00E2\u0080\u0096 since \u00E2\u0080\u0095[p]roblematically, this strategy insists on female suffering as the prerequisite for feminist agency and is complicit with the patriarchal ideals of the docile, submissive, and accommodating woman\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (3-4). 45 offers an alternative to the (sober) role she is expected to play, even if by doing so she appears all the more passive. This \u00E2\u0080\u0095appearing,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 however, is simply an element of Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s disguise. Her trickery lies in presenting a doll-like passivity to the world, a passivity that plays into the patriarchal desire for female subordination, while actively rebelling against the forces oppressing her through her fiercely ironic narrative mode. Literary critic Sylvie Maurel discusses Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s practice of quoting \u00E2\u0080\u0095rather than speak[ing] a language which is felt as a strange and coercive system from which the female speaking subject is alienated,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which results in her distance from the words she borrows and employs. Maurel suggests that [w]ere it not for the various sequences in which Sasha, contrary to [Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s] earlier heroines, proves to be an expert speaker, this distancing might have posited Sasha as a defective one. Instead, it converts language into an object of inquiry ironically scrutinized by a knowledgeable heroine. (109) By talking back to her oppressors\u00E2\u0080\u0094even if internally\u00E2\u0080\u0094Sasha resists being reduced to the passive alcoholic she appears to be. As readers, we see both sides of her drunken act: that which she presents to the waiters and patrons of the bar, and that which constitutes a strikingly different inner world. By turning away from \u00E2\u0080\u0095the predicament\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of patriarchal and capitalist culture, Sasha turns to alcohol. Cultural theorist Avital Ronell, writing about \u00E2\u0080\u0095Madame Bovary, Heidegger, and the structure of Being as addiction\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Culler 2) in her study Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, explores how Emma Bovary, as addict, is in a perpetual state of craving that troubles and complicates her desire to live, to be actively engaged in the world. Emma, in Ronell\u00E2\u0080\u0098s Responses such as Friedling\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, however, fail to take into account the often complex negotiations of agency and oppression. 46 formulation, is doubly transgressive for being a woman as well as an addict. \u00E2\u0080\u0095A woman,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095is the mark of a fissure in active living, a thing of the side-lines, beside the point and attracted actively to a substitute for active living\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (101-102). \u00E2\u0080\u0095[A] thing of the side-lines,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 perhaps, because in the patriarchal economy that names men as subjects of their own narratives, women are figured as secondary. (Emma becomes such a subject only by subsuming herself within the narratives of the romance novel.) Ronell writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095Freud has characterized the addict as evoking the charm of cats and birds of prey with their inaccessibility, their apparent libidinal autonomy,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which is \u00E2\u0080\u0095not very far from his description, in another context, of women\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (53-54). In Ronell\u00E2\u0080\u0098s reading of Freud, both addicts and women subscribe to a kind of \u00E2\u0080\u0095[n]arcissistic withdrawal [that] introduces a scandalous figure into the society of humans by removing the addicted [and/or female] subject from the sphere of human connectibility\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (53-54). In this formulation, addicts, women, and perhaps especially, addicted women are threatening to the social order insofar as they don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t rely on it. In thrall to his or her addiction, the addict has no need for anyone or anything else. Similarly, women, relegated to the \u00E2\u0080\u0095side-lines\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and as such seen as mysteriously inaccessible by their male observers (such as Freud), find alternative ways of being. Discussing Emma and her \u00E2\u0080\u0095addiction\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to novels, Ronell declares that \u00E2\u0080\u0095a woman finds a substitute\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (101) for \u00E2\u0080\u0095active living,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 for community engagement. Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s announcement that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[she] want[s] one thing and one thing only\u00E2\u0080\u0094to be left alone\u00E2\u0080\u0096 is followed by her \u00E2\u0080\u0095substitute\u00E2\u0080\u0096: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled \u00E2\u0080\u0097Dum vivimus, vivamus\u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (369). The addicted woman is a transgressive figure in that she wilfully chooses a destructive substitute over \u00E2\u0080\u0095human connectibility\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and the socially acceptable roles available to her. 47 The Abject Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s role as drunk woman, then, involves elements of deception and disguise that allow her to articulate her own form of resistance. I now want to consider how Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s act of masquerading\u00E2\u0080\u0094her quick shift from \u00E2\u0080\u0095femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to drunk\u00E2\u0080\u0094makes her a figure of deception aligned with Julia Kristeva\u00E2\u0080\u0098s conception of the abject. By embodying in one figure that which is both respectable and repulsive, by \u00E2\u0080\u0095passing\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as one and then, with one drink, becoming the other, Sasha invokes the abject \u00E2\u0080\u0095with a clean, false face\u00E2\u0080\u0096 where the \u00E2\u0080\u0095horror is hidden, not behind the surface of the body as some internal growth may be, but behind a benevolent disguise\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Goodnow 37). Significantly, this abject position provides Sasha with a way of seeing born of doubleness and unstable boundaries. It allows for a mode of sight predicated on, as Kristeva writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (4). In a flashback to her life with Enno, the husband who left her, Sasha recalls looking at herself in the mirror and thinking, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I look thin\u00E2\u0080\u0094too thin\u00E2\u0080\u0094and dirty and haggard, with that expression that you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (418). Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s drunk narrative, bereft of transcendence and heroism, ultimately allows her to penetrate through false surfaces to \u00E2\u0080\u0095what things are like underneath.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Like the kitten with its \u00E2\u0080\u0095nostalgie de la boue\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in the story she tells, Sasha, too, is drawn to what is crude and degrading, if only because she is able to see it when others cannot. She is quick to point out people\u00E2\u0080\u0098s hypocrisy, their posturing and fraudulence, their saying one thing and doing another. She routinely undermines the euphemistic language used to describe hotel rooms; in one passage, she overhears a man asking about a room, while she notes, in a matter-of-fact 48 way, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I watch cockroaches crawling from underneath the carpet and crawling back again\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (363). The first room in which she stays in Paris with Enno, having long anticipated the pleasures of the city, is described as pleasant, but \u00E2\u0080\u0095that night we woke up scratching, and the wall was covered with bugs, crawling slowly\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (420). She mimics the standard descriptions, saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095A room. A nice room. A beautiful room. A beautiful room with bath. A very beautiful room with bath. A bedroom and sitting-room with bath. Up to the dizzy heights of the suite,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 only to add, \u00E2\u0080\u0095But, alas! the waiter has a louse on his collar\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (363). Sasha, inhabiting a borderland herself, sees the unspoken underside of things. Speaking of England, she says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095We have our ration of rose- leaves, but only because rose-leaves are a gentle laxative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (440). Even the description of a smell\u00E2\u0080\u0094something known immediately, viscerally\u00E2\u0080\u0094relies on the hidden and repugnant, with Sasha saying: This morning the hall smells like a very cheap Turkish bath in London\u00E2\u0080\u0094the sort of place that is got up to look respectable and clean outside, the passage very antiseptic and the woman who meets you a cross between a prison-wardress and a deaconess, and everybody speaking in whispering voices with lowered eyes: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Foam or Turkish, madam?\u00E2\u0080\u0096 And then you go down into the Turkish bath itself and into a fog of stale sweat\u00E2\u0080\u0094ten, twenty years old. (364) Does Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s hallway smell antiseptic or like stale sweat? Does she locate in the clean smell the revolting one? The passage is ambiguous, yet clearly illustrates how the duplicitous abject informs Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s perspective. Significantly, it is not only Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s quick shift from the clean-faced respectable woman to the repulsive drunk that performs her abjection, but also her narrative: her descriptions of the \u00E2\u0080\u0095respectable and clean\u00E2\u0080\u0096 often go on for a sentence or two, sometimes longer, without the reader suspecting anything until she undermines that impression of cleanliness with a 49 revelatory, revolting \u00E2\u0080\u0095punch line,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of sorts. Sasha reproduces for the reader the shock and horror that results in an encounter with the abject; her narrative doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t simply describe the abject, but is constituted by it in a fundamental way. Similarly, the abject is also constituted by narrative: the cockroaches in the hotel bathroom, the louse on the waiter\u00E2\u0080\u0098s collar, the confusing odour of the hallway\u00E2\u0080\u0094all achieve their status as abject through Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative framing. Even her disturbing switch from respectable woman to drunk is primarily enacted through narrative means, as she identifies the nearly imperceptible shift in how she is perceived, noting, \u00E2\u0080\u0095[n]ow the feeling of the room is different.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Sasha, as a female alcoholic, is of course transgressive in her rejection of codes of feminine behaviour and middle-class propriety, but she is doubly so in her performances of \u00E2\u0080\u0095femme convenable\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and drunk woman, particularly as one role transitions, almost imperceptibly, into the next. Good Morning, Midnight is a text anchored in the in-between, the liminal realm between disguises, the space in which things and people are exposed for what they are\u00E2\u0080\u0094often dirty and cruel, respectively. Britzolakis contends that the novel \u00E2\u0080\u0095insists [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] on waste and the issue of waste disposal,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 pointing to Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095proximity with other abjected urban marginals such as the homeless destitute sleeping in a caf\u00C3\u00A9, and the impoverished woman whose job is washing dishes in a restaurant\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (468). The story Serge tells about the woman from Martinique offers another compelling example of the breakdown of categories; after finding her lying on the floor outside his room in London, drunk, he describes her as having \u00E2\u0080\u0095been crying so much that it was impossible to tell whether she was pretty or ugly or young or old\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (403). Sasha immediately identifies with her, particularly because Serge relates that she asked for a drink as Sasha has just done. The Martinique woman occupies an ambiguous position; without identifying physical markers, Serge cannot tell if she is desirable or grotesque. Yet her drunken 50 crying situates her as the latter, as Serge continues by saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095But it was difficult to speak to her reasonably, because I had all the time this feeling that I was talking to something that was no longer quite human, no longer quite alive\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (403). The woman\u00E2\u0080\u0094drunk, poor, of mixed-race\u00E2\u0080\u0094is disturbing for the multiple ways in which she exists as other and resists categorization. Her position as someone existing in the in-between leaves Serge to also question her being alive and human. The novel thus presents minor characters who echo Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s own abjection, while informing her way of operating in the world. Hers is a perspective that has done away with illusions: her world is dirty and deconsecrated; her sight is made clearer and keener the lower she sinks. The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s shocking ending\u00E2\u0080\u0094when Sasha embraces the man who has terrified her throughout the novel, saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095Yes\u00E2\u0080\u0094yes\u00E2\u0080\u0094yes...\u00E2\u0080\u0096\u00E2\u0080\u0094is a final recognition of her position as abject. The \u00E2\u0080\u0095commis voyageur,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 described as a \u00E2\u0080\u0095ghost,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as \u00E2\u0080\u0095thin as a skeleton\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (350), as giving Sasha a \u00E2\u0080\u0095nightmare feeling,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 also wears a \u00E2\u0080\u0095beautiful dressing-gown, immaculately white\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (364). Emery characterizes critical responses to the last scene as reading it as either Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095welcome to death\u00E2\u0080\u0096 or her \u00E2\u0080\u0095rebirth through transcendence of the self in union with another human being\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (145, 146). My reading situates Sasha as finally conceding to her vision\u00E2\u0080\u0094a vision that relies on the skewed perception of a drunk, a vision born of the masquerade. Sasha recognizes the commis for what he is: a nightmare cloaked in a clean, white gown. She seeks in his arms not the warmth of human companionship, nor the easy escape of death, but an acknowledgment of abjection, an encounter with it, an embrace of it. At one point, Sasha says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095You imagine the carefully-pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it\u00E2\u0080\u0098s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (390). Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative is the distorting mirror\u00E2\u0080\u0094disturbing, in-between, out of bounds, intoxicated\u00E2\u0080\u0094in 51 which the truth is made visible. Her embrace of the commis, neither a \u00E2\u0080\u0095yes\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to life nor to death, is a grim negotiation of the two. 52 3 \u00E2\u0080\u009CI Talk One Way\u00E2\u0080\u009D: Narrating over Gin (and Wine) in Jane Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Two Serious Ladies Discussions of Jane Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel Two Serious Ladies typically begin with critics attempting to account for its disorienting\u00E2\u0080\u0094one might say intoxicating\u00E2\u0080\u0094effect on the reader, which usually results in a listing of the text\u00E2\u0080\u0098s formal oddities; in this respect, mine will be no different. However, the articulation of this disorientation often stops there, as if describing the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s style gets it \u00E2\u0080\u0095over with,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 so to speak, and makes room for a weightier and separate discussion of thematic meaning. This is to treat Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s style, her use of dialogue, her plotting of character, as novelty for its own sake, comic devices that aim for nothing more than a laugh or a surprised reaction. It is to conclude, as Edith Walton did in her 1943 New York Times book review, that the novel \u00E2\u0080\u0095strains too hard to startle and to shock\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095all too often is just merely silly\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (B4 14). Other critics, however, recognize Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s style as key to her literary practice, as when Ellen G. Friedman writes, \u00E2\u0080\u0095the inconsistency, randomness, and contradiction contribute to the narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0098s seductive and liberating strangeness\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (246); when Alan Tinkler assesses the \u00E2\u0080\u0095disorientation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of the novel as \u00E2\u0080\u0095intentional, as Jane Bowles wants the reader to (re)orient to a new literature\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (67); or when Kraft concludes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[h]er style expresses her theme more clearly than the retelling of any narrative could do\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (275). However, none of these critics provides a satisfying elaboration on these pronouncements. In what ways, then, is the text disorienting? The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s oddities include \u00E2\u0080\u0095[t]he non sequiturs of [the characters\u00E2\u0080\u0098] conversation, their paradoxical pronouncements, the eccentric movements through time and space\u00E2\u0080\u0096; sentences which \u00E2\u0080\u0095often occur in discrete, monadic units, not dependably connected to what precedes or follows\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Friedman \u00E2\u0080\u0095Contents\u00E2\u0080\u0096 244-245); and \u00E2\u0080\u0095weirdly styled dialogue and linguistically \u00E2\u0080\u0097off- centre\u00E2\u0080\u0098 depictions of outrageous improprieties in relationships as if both [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] were perfectly 53 normal\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Wheeler 169-170). The narrative moves in a jerky manner, with seemingly important developments treated in a sentence or two, as when Miss Gamelon moves in with Miss Goering after just making her acquaintance, or when Arnold and Miss Gamelon abruptly stop hating each other and become a couple. The novel enacts a constant shifting of terms, a perpetual display of relativity, as each character redefines what is held to be normal or strange. That much of the novel unfolds in locations where drinks are available and consumed\u00E2\u0080\u0094a cocktail party, Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s family home, various bars in Panama and New York\u00E2\u0080\u0094is fitting since the characters operate as if drunk. They are comically quick to declare their love, especially when the situation merits no such declaration, and often act completely unaware of social conventions. They speak with a blunt honesty reminiscent of children (or the intoxicated). And, significantly, apart from Mrs. Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095walk[ing] in a crooked path\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (199) at the bar in the last scene, the characters remain markedly unchanged by their drinking, with their sober moments possessing the same off-kilter quality as their drunken ones. This is because in Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel, drunkenness figures not as a temporary state brought on by drinking, but as a condition, or symptom, of being. Drunkenness functions as a metaphor for a world, recognizable in its outlines, and yet rendered uncanny, discordant, off. If the \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunk narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of Good Morning, Midnight can be said to centre on Sasha\u00E2\u0080\u0098s individual drinking practices, to reflect her perspective, then that of Two Serious Ladies resides at the level of narrative itself, belonging to no one character and yet reflecting the worldview of the text. Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative can be characterized as intoxicated in two fundamental ways: first, because it represents a topsy-turvy world in which the two female protagonists pursue their quests for happiness, self-discovery, and salvation on their own terms, without recourse to a patriarchal framework that positions them as other; if Bowles places a woman as her questing 54 philosopher in the \u00E2\u0080\u0095permissible\u00E2\u0080\u0096 world of the drunk narrative, then she is also asking why this cannot be the case in more sober situations. Second, the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, with their primal, drunken need to narrate\u00E2\u0080\u0094or, in Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s case, avoid narrating\u00E2\u0080\u0094ultimately call attention to the limitations of both narrative and human knowledge. In Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s hands, the modernist drunk narrative allows for a radical reimagining of the questing, narrating hero, while simultaneously calling into question the very possibility of that narration. In the previous chapter, my discussion of Sasha situates her as reacting, from a vulnerable, weakened position, to the oppressive forces that both constitute and extinguish her sense of self. Many critics have approached Two Serious Ladies in much the same manner, reading Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s forays into the world and Miss Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s embrace of lesbian desire as opposing, even while being conditioned by, patriarchal systems of oppression. If feminism can be said to embody the tension between \u00E2\u0080\u0095the positivity of politics, or affirmative action [on] behalf of women as social subjects\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095the negativity inherent in the radical critique of patriarchal, bourgeois culture\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (de Lauretis 25), then these critical responses fall largely in the second category. Andrew Lakritz writes that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[b]y following her characters as they transgress the boundaries between worlds, Bowles articulates the struggle of these two women to reveal the prohibitions and limits of patriarchal culture for what they are: hollow\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (223). James Kraft writes that each serious lady \u00E2\u0080\u0095is seeking to be free of the formal confines of the world that hold the self in place,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which include \u00E2\u0080\u0095family love where there is no love, social conventions that do not apply, sexual attitudes that do not work, genteel manners and methods of speech that are meaningless\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (275). Kathy Justice Gentile asserts that the narrative \u00E2\u0080\u0095highlights the seriousness and silliness of the difficulties each woman faces, and thus the obstacles any woman who chooses to be \u00E2\u0080\u0097original\u00E2\u0080\u0098 must overcome in a society where homogeneous standards for feminine 55 conduct are strongly encouraged\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (55-56). These critical responses take as their starting point a world, constraining and patriarchal, against which Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s female characters must \u00E2\u0080\u0095struggle,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which they must attempt to \u00E2\u0080\u0095overcome.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 At work here is the assumption that a text featuring female protagonists who are, in some sense, \u00E2\u0080\u0095questing\u00E2\u0080\u0096 must begin with their subordination in order to chronicle their eventual attainment of agency and freedom. There appears to be a critical desire to impose a certain kind of feminist narrative on Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, to read them as inhabiting situations not wholly suggested by the text. The protagonists of Two Serious Ladies are indeed transgressive figures, but not for their attacks on an oppressive system; rather, in their very obliviousness to it. While Mrs. Copperfield must shirk her husband in order to give herself fully to the Panamanian prostitute Pacifica, she successfully does so without too much trouble. Her struggles to achieve happiness, to follow the paths of her desire, are her own; despite an earnest attempt to play the paternal authority figure, Mr. Copperfield ultimately remains peripheral. It is true that she \u00E2\u0080\u0095love[s] to be free\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (42), and considers her marriage burdensome, but unlike most narratives of female liberation and self- discovery, which dramatize the moment of escape and treat it as central and climactic, Mrs. Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s break with her husband is carried out in an understated manner; their separation is achieved quickly and nearly wordlessly\u00E2\u0080\u0094its cause never overtly discussed\u00E2\u0080\u0094and the whole incident becomes almost a non-event in the greater scheme of Mrs. Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s journey. Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s struggles are also self-authored. She enters into relationships with men, but only insofar as they further her quest, her need to \u00E2\u0080\u0095work out [her] own little idea of salvation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (28). When she sets out on her journey, she does so with a mentality as unencumbered by patriarchal restraints as any male epic hero\u00E2\u0080\u0098s. While the novel depicts men and women living within this patriarchal framework\u00E2\u0080\u0094Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s mother remains unhappily tied to her house and family, 56 Pacifica is physically and sexually abused by Meyer, Arthur is ridiculed for being an unmanly \u00E2\u0080\u0095sissy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (23)\u00E2\u0080\u0094the narrative\u00E2\u0080\u0098s focus on Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, its unflinching treatment of their quests, mirrors their own understanding of themselves as subjects. Two Serious Ladies can be called a drunk narrative primarily for the way in which it envisions two women who quest with impunity, who act outside of accepted feminine roles, who choose another way (without, perhaps, seeing it as an \u00E2\u0080\u0095other\u00E2\u0080\u0096 way). The narrator registers the shock of the male characters when the protagonists act contrary to their expectations, yet doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t explain or justify this shock, appearing as blind to patriarchal desires as its \u00E2\u0080\u0095two serious ladies.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 This phenomenon is nicely illustrated by Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s decision to leave Andy, which he responds to by threatening to shame her. \u00E2\u0080\u0095I really have no sense of shame,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 she answers, adding, \u00E2\u0080\u0095and I think your own sense of shame is terribly exaggerated, besides being a terrific sap on your energies\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (188). The narrative records Andy\u00E2\u0080\u0098s outrage and shock at this answer, his cries of \u00E2\u0080\u0095You\u00E2\u0080\u0098re crazy\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095Lunatic!\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (188-189), but then abruptly shifts from this charged moment to a more subdued one in which \u00E2\u0080\u0095Miss Goering hurried out of the ice-cream parlor after having kissed Andy lightly on the head, because she realized that if she did not leave him very quickly she would miss her appointment\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (188). The narration doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t offer a gloss on the encounter, nor does it include Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s reaction to Andy\u00E2\u0080\u0098s accusations. Instead, that Miss Goering has no shame, an affect often characterized as feminine, as women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095pervasive affective attunement to the social environment\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Bartky 85), is treated as nothing out of the ordinary. The narrative voice echoes Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s behaviour, the way she selectively hears and responds to the desires of others, her narrow preoccupation with her own quest; the narrator discards Andy as a character just as quickly as Miss Goering takes leave of him as a lover. 57 \u00E2\u0080\u009CYou Flop Around like a Little Baby\u00E2\u0080\u009D: Speech as Primitive State This lack of narrative closure in the form of judgments or explanations is conspicuous in a novel that features characters who frequently speak, often in monologues, about their beliefs and patterns of behaviour. In this capacity, too, Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters appear drunk: their feverish need to tell, to narrate who they are and what they believe often comes out of nowhere, unbidden by the conversation, requiring a listener and yet rendering that listener nearly inconsequential. Mrs. Quill, the proprietor of the Hotel de las Palmas in Panama, indulges in such a speech with Mrs. Copperfield when they first meet: It\u00E2\u0080\u0098s balmy here and they [her clients] all enjoy themselves. They talk and they drink and they make love; they go on picnics; they go to the movies; they dance, sometimes all night long...I need never be lonely unless I want to...I can always go and dance with them if I feel like it. I have a fellow who takes me out to the dancing places whenever I want to go and I can always string along. I love it here. Wouldn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t go back home for a load of monkeys. It\u00E2\u0080\u0098s hot sometimes, but mostly balmy, and nobody\u00E2\u0080\u0098s in a hurry. Sex doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t interest me and I sleep like a baby. I am never bothered with dreams unless I eat something which sits on my stomach. You have to pay a price when you indulge yourself. I have a terrific yen for lobster \u00C3\u00A0 la Newburg, you see. I go to Bill Grey\u00E2\u0080\u0098s restaurant I should say about once every month with this fellow. (55-56) Mrs. Quill\u00E2\u0080\u0098s speech takes the form of an outpouring of mundane facts that somehow, vaguely, tell her story. It\u00E2\u0080\u0098s excessive in that it gestures outward, drifting from the topic of Pacifica and her hotel customers to her \u00E2\u0080\u0095yen for lobster \u00C3\u00A0 la Newburg.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 There\u00E2\u0080\u0098s a slack quality to her speech: digressive and associative, it denies Mrs. Copperfield her dialogic role; instead of speaking to 58 Pacifica\u00E2\u0080\u0098s situation, which is what started the conversation in the first place, Mrs. Quill brings the talk around to herself, almost as if to explain herself. She does so through recourse to the primal, with her talk of sex, sleep, food, and cravings. Her desire to speak of herself, then, to narrate, emerges as a pressing need on par with the needs of her body, the act of speaking seemingly taking precedence over what is spoken about. Significantly, this scene unfolds as Mrs. Quill and Mrs. Copperfield are drinking gin, and corresponds to other instances in the novel when the women drink. These instances are marked by the women\u00E2\u0080\u0098s shared understanding of what it means to act \u00E2\u0080\u0095like a baby,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to become drunk, to relinquish (verbal, physical, intellectual) control. As she enjoys her drink at the Hotel Washington with Toby, Mrs. Quill says, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m afraid I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m behaving just like a baby, but there\u00E2\u0080\u0098s no one who likes the good things in this world better than me\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (82). Mrs. Copperfield invokes the phrase as she drinks alone in her hotel room: \u00E2\u0080\u0095\u00E2\u0080\u00A6now for a little spot of gin to chase my troubles away. There isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t any other way that\u00E2\u0080\u0098s as good. At a certain point gin takes everything off your hands and you flop around like a little baby. Tonight I want to be a little baby\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (71). To \u00E2\u0080\u0095be a little baby\u00E2\u0080\u0096 is to subscribe to a slackened economy of being where \u00E2\u0080\u0095everything\u00E2\u0080\u0096 is taken \u00E2\u0080\u0095off your hands,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 where it becomes permissible to \u00E2\u0080\u0095flop around\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and indulge hedonistic desire. The association I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m attempting to establish here, taking a cue from Dina Al-Kassim\u00E2\u0080\u0098s work, is how speech in Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s novel operates as a \u00E2\u0080\u0095primitive state\u00E2\u0080\u0096 akin to \u00E2\u0080\u0095drunkenness or being a baby\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (120). Two Serious Ladies features characters who demonstrate an almost primal need to narrate their stories, to speak to others about who they are. There\u00E2\u0080\u0098s an intimate openness in these speeches, as when Arnold, after just meeting Miss Goering and bringing her home, starts telling her about his family problems and thwarted artistic ambitions, concluding in a comically earnest manner with: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Even though I am thirty-nine years 59 old I still am hoping very seriously that I will be able to make a definite break with my family\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (20). In the narrative Arnold constructs about himself, Bowles creates a parodic K\u00C3\u00BCnstlerroman, where the bumbling, thirty-nine year old real estate agent stands in for the young, struggling artist. Instead of an oppressive bourgeois culture, Arnold chafes at the demands of his elderly parents, with whom he still lives. He establishes his bohemianism not in terms of his artistic ambitions\u00E2\u0080\u0094which are made no more specific than \u00E2\u0080\u0095[s]omething [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] in the book line, or in the painting line\u00E2\u0080\u0096\u00E2\u0080\u0094but by asserting that his friends \u00E2\u0080\u0095think very little about earning money at all\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (20). The trappings and attitudes associated with the artist\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life, the poverty and rebellion, come to displace what the artist actually does, namely, producing art. The discrepancy between what Arthur says, what he voices about himself, and the reality of his situation gestures to the limitations of narrative. His declaration to Miss Goering that \u00E2\u0080\u0095I am now interested in being an entirely new personality as different from my former self as A is from Z\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (121) comes across as false and exaggerated, and yet this type of utterance is standard for Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters. Their assertions, made perhaps in a bid to sound decisive or important, ultimately bear little relation to their lived realities. Arthur may declare himself an artist-in-waiting or propose a radical personality change, but his words say less about his actual intent and beliefs than his need to say them. This is apparent when Arthur questions Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0094whose plan for salvation takes a consistent if enigmatic form throughout the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0094about her methods: \u00E2\u0080\u0097I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t know why you find it so interesting and intellectual to seek out a new city,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Arnold, cupping his chin in his hand and looking at her fixedly. \u00E2\u0080\u0097Because I believe the hardest thing for me to do is really move from one thing to another, partly,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Miss Goering. 60 \u00E2\u0080\u0097Spiritually,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Arnold, trying to speak in a more sociable tone, \u00E2\u0080\u0097spiritually I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m constantly making little journeys and changing my entire nature every six months.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 \u00E2\u0080\u0097I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t believe it for a minute,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Miss Goering. \u00E2\u0080\u0097No, no, it is true. Also I can tell you that I think it is absolute nonsense to move physically from one place to another. All places are more or less alike.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 Miss Goering did not answer this. She pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders and of a sudden looked quite old and very sad indeed. Arnold began to doubt the validity of what he had just said, and immediately resolved to make exactly the same excursion from which Miss Goering had just returned, on the following night. He squared his jaw and pulled out a notebook from his pocket. \u00E2\u0080\u0097Now, will you give me the particulars on how to reach the mainland?\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Arnold. \u00E2\u0080\u0097The hours when the train leaves and so forth.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 \u00E2\u0080\u0097Why do you ask?\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Miss Goering. \u00E2\u0080\u0097Because I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m going to go there myself tomorrow night. I should have thought you would have guessed that by this time.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 \u00E2\u0080\u0097No, judging by what you just finished saying to me, I would not have guessed it.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 \u00E2\u0080\u0097Well, I talk one way,\u00E2\u0080\u0098 said Arnold, \u00E2\u0080\u0097but I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m really, underneath, the same kind of maniac that you are.\u00E2\u0080\u0098 (158-159) This passage is emblematic of the way in which Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters engage in a recurring game of conversational misfiring, where words routinely fail to hit their mark; instead of serving as a vehicle for communication, the characters\u00E2\u0080\u0098 conversation becomes a verbal record of the failure to communicate. Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s absurd contention that his underlying motives, his decision to ape Miss 61 Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s plan, would be obvious to her\u00E2\u0080\u0094despite what he has just said in so assertive a manner\u00E2\u0080\u0094points to a crisis of interpretation. Miss Goering both discredits his words (\u00E2\u0080\u0095I don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t believe it for a minute\u00E2\u0080\u0096) and validates them (\u00E2\u0080\u0095judging by what you just finished saying to me, I would not have guessed it\u00E2\u0080\u0096), so that locating Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s meaning becomes a complicated task; meaning isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t located wholly within language, in the words he speaks, nor is it entirely outside of it, residing in unspoken intentions. Humorously, in saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I talk one way,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Arthur treats his slippery use of language as commonplace, acknowledging that his speech is often disingenuous and purely rhetorical. Yet this doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t stop him from believing what he says, as if stating things aloud will make them true. Indeed, Miss Goering and Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s conversation takes the form of a competition for spiritual dominance, in which deep-seated conviction stands in for the substance of that faith. Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s plan for salvation is not explained here in anything but vague terms, and even then, her statement is tempered by the word \u00E2\u0080\u0095partly\u00E2\u0080\u0096 that follows it. Still, Miss Goering doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t entirely entrust her plan to narrative: she answers Arnold\u00E2\u0080\u0098s question, then becomes silent and \u00E2\u0080\u0095very sad\u00E2\u0080\u0096 upon being challenged. It is Arnold who pronounces definitive statement after statement, flaunting his conviction, until Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s saddened response has the surprising effect of prompting Arnold\u00E2\u0080\u0098s philosophical turnaround. Here, speech functions as a stopgap for the more involved processes of knowing and believing; Arnold speaks before he knows, perhaps because knowing is, ultimately, out of reach. In a similar scenario, Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s father, after deciding to return to his wife, writes an apology letter to her and asks Miss Goering to read it. The letter sets out an explanation for his behavior, the crux of which is \u00E2\u0080\u0095that there is, in every man\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life, a strong urge to leave his life behind him for a while and seek a new one\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (181). He tells Miss Goering after she has finished reading, \u00E2\u0080\u0095It is simple [...] and it expresses what I felt.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 She asks if this is truly so, and he 62 responds with \u00E2\u0080\u0095I believe so [...] It must have been\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (my emphasis 181), an answer that comes across as uncertain at best. Here the impulse to narrate precedes the moment of understanding and self-recognition; narration, held as a means of legitimizing experience, works to obscure it instead. Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s father writes his letter as a way of setting down a version of events he can believe in, of providing this phase of his life with narrative boundaries. At stake is not the truthfulness of his story so much as its capacity to offer something definitive and final: for many of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, the impulse to narrate is born of the desire to have \u00E2\u0080\u0095everything\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0095tak[en] off [their] hands.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s father doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t require a true understanding of his motivations, just a story that comes close enough, one that presents a believable approximation of the truth. The characters\u00E2\u0080\u0098 desire for narrative is a desire for narrative at its most general\u00E2\u0080\u0094as a means of speaking, being heard, and making contact of some kind. While Rhys overtly addresses the taboos aimed at the drinking woman\u00E2\u0080\u0094her association with the prostitute, the way she transgressively shirks her social role\u00E2\u0080\u0094Bowles draws on this other, ontological, aspect of drunkenness in her phrase \u00E2\u0080\u0095being a baby.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 In this capacity, the dangers of intoxication are universal, as the repressive forces of reason and morality give way to an infantilized, hedonistic mode of behaviour. To \u00E2\u0080\u0095be a little baby\u00E2\u0080\u0096 is to tacitly reject the norms and codes of behaviour\u00E2\u0080\u0094legal, moral, and social\u00E2\u0080\u0094governing society. Just as Ronell frames both addict and woman as threatening for their \u00E2\u0080\u0095libidinal autonomy,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 so Bowles reveals the quest for meaning, as articulated by the majority of her characters, to be a primal, irrational quest for pleasure and closure. The reified philosophical quest threatens to become nothing more than the narcissistic babbling of a drunk. With Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative mode, however, Bowles complicates this picture; if the philosophical quest devolves into drunken, incomprehensible 63 prattle, then this says more about the nature of existence than it does about the speakers trying to make sense of it. \u00E2\u0080\u009CGiving an Account of Oneself\u00E2\u0080\u009D In contrast to the other characters in the novel, Miss Goering doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t subscribe to an excessive and infantile practice of speaking. Instead of declaring her beliefs, as Arnold or his father might, she prefers \u00E2\u0080\u0095to work out [her] own little idea of salvation,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and this idea remains something she grapples with for the entirety of the novel. Her plan is provisional, must be \u00E2\u0080\u0095work[ed] out,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and thus cannot be resolved instantaneously. Unlike Arnold, who \u00E2\u0080\u0095immediately resolve[s]\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to follow a different course, Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s ideas are slow to be formulated and articulated. Indeed, the closest she comes to revealing her guiding principles is to say, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I really believe that it is necessary for me to live in some more tawdry place and particularly in some place where I was not born\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (28). She adds to this by saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095The idea [...] is to change first of our own volition and according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary changes on us\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (29), never, of course, clarifying who or what she means by \u00E2\u0080\u0095they\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and \u00E2\u0080\u0095changes.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 However, this reluctance to speak of her plan for salvation isn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t secrecy, but rather an acknowledgment that her plan remains largely unknown. There are hints as to the nature of her spiritual enterprise\u00E2\u0080\u0094she must masochistically leave her comfortable home and seek out the tawdry and debased\u00E2\u0080\u0094but no overarching system is ever revealed. Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095salvation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 remains hazy and ill-defined, with her use of the term adding to the mystery. As Wheeler writes, themes of \u00E2\u0080\u0095spiritual development, religious feeling, and morality [...] are treated in hilariously grotesque, bizarre styles and narrative forms which seeks to turn conventional notions of the meaning of such themes on their heads\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (172). The novel invokes Christian codes of morality, and yet it soon becomes clear that Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s beliefs are located outside of that particular 64 framework. The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s opening scene illustrates this disjunction as the young Miss Goering performs bizarre rituals on her sister\u00E2\u0080\u0098s friend in the name of God. Her improvised baptism of the girl in muddy water, her reassurances that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[i]f you let me do this, you won\u00E2\u0080\u0098t go to hell\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (7), suggests an engagement with the vocabulary and forms of religious observance if not a strict adherence to its contents. As an adult, Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s search for meaning takes a shape no less amorphous than those of her childhood doctrines. To Arthur\u00E2\u0080\u0098s invitation to stay the night, when they first meet, Miss Goering replies with: \u00E2\u0080\u0095I probably shall [...] although it is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (19). Her \u00E2\u0080\u0095code,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 while never explained for the reader, functions mainly as a marker of paradox. While the other characters of the novel engage in naming their beliefs and histories (however inaccurately), Miss Goering appears to favour the unresolved and unspeakable. At the beginning of the novel, she tells Mrs. Copperfield and Arthur a story involving a building that is about to be torn down, located across from her sister\u00E2\u0080\u0098s home. She recounts how it started to rain, with water gradually soaking the wallpaper, creating \u00E2\u0080\u0095dark spots [...] which were growing larger\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (17). Mrs. Copperfield responds to this last detail by saying, \u00E2\u0080\u0095How amusing [...] or perhaps it was depressing\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (17), indicating the kind of critical ambivalence characteristic of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, as well as their need to speak despite this ambivalence. Mrs. Copperfield cannot decide if the rain-sodden wallpaper is amusing or depressing, but feels the necessity of interjecting a comment all the same. To speak is to lay claim to a truth, to an interpretive position, that holds at bay the terrifying consequences of not knowing. Mrs. Copperfield turns to speech as she does to drink, with the object of becoming a baby, of having the doubts and fears of existential questioning simply \u00E2\u0080\u0095taken off her hands.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Miss Goering, in contrast, inhabits the 65 interstitial realm between knowing and speaking, embracing meaning as dynamic and ever- unfolding. Both approaches, however, gesture to the limitations and difficulties of narrating, of putting the complexities of experience into words. Judith Butler writes of the difficulties of \u00E2\u0080\u0095giving an account of oneself\u00E2\u0080\u0096 in an essay of the same name. She contends that because narrating posits an \u00E2\u0080\u0095I,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 which \u00E2\u0080\u0095cannot tell the story of its own emergence, and the conditions of its own possibility without in some sense bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one could not have been present\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (26), there\u00E2\u0080\u0098s a fictive quality at work that robs the narrating \u00E2\u0080\u0095I\u00E2\u0080\u0096 of its claim to absolute authority. Butler writes: Fictional narration requires no referent to work as narrative, and we might say that the irrecoverability of the referent, its foreclosure to us, is the very condition of possibility for an account of myself if that account is to take narrative form. It does not destroy narration but produces it precisely in a fictional direction. So to be more precise, I would have to say that I can tell the story of my origin and even tell it again and again, in several ways; but the story of my origin I tell is not one for which I am accountable, and it cannot establish my accountability. At least, let\u00E2\u0080\u0098s hope not, since, over wine usually, I tell it in various ways, and the accounts are not always consistent with one another. (26) The difficulties inherent to narration are always present for the speaking (and writing) subject, but are even more obvious when it comes to narrating \u00E2\u0080\u0095over wine.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Indeed, in Butler\u00E2\u0080\u0098s playful addition of that detail is a fitting analogy for \u00E2\u0080\u0095giving an account of oneself\u00E2\u0080\u0096: narrating one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s life will inevitably be a drunken-like exercise lacking linearity and accuracy; ironically, only with recourse to the techniques of fiction can it pass as truthful. Of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, those who subscribe to a slackened mode of narration, while perhaps believing in its legitimizing capacities, 66 ultimately attest to their stories\u00E2\u0080\u0098 lack of accountability. Arthur may simply desire a system of belief to rival Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s, but by frequently switching positions he demonstrates the hollowness of his conviction. His father, too, writes his wife a letter explaining his actions in order to elicit forgiveness and attain some measure of narrative closure. Yet by remaining ignorant of his true motives for leaving her, he comes no closer to offering an authentic account of his feelings and beliefs. Similarly, Mrs. Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s interjection of \u00E2\u0080\u0095how amusing\u00E2\u0080\u0096 and then, \u00E2\u0080\u0095or perhaps it was depressing,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 during Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story, points to her inability to gauge her own response to the story, as well as to discern Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative intentions. Butler formulates \u00E2\u0080\u0095giving an account of oneself\u00E2\u0080\u0096 as the basis for an ethical relation between self and other: the encounter with the other is required in order to recognize one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s own subjectivity, but that very encounter is also that which \u00E2\u0080\u0095dislocates\u00E2\u0080\u0096 one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s \u00E2\u0080\u0095first-person perspective\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (23), which troubles one\u00E2\u0080\u0098s sense of being an \u00E2\u0080\u0095I.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 Significantly, while Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters all rely on the presence of the other in articulating their philosophies, this reliance hardly translates into an ethical imperative. Instead, the characters\u00E2\u0080\u0098 need for a listener, an observer, or, in Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s case, a companion, only emphasizes their insularity and narcissism. Shortly after demonstrating her obsession with Pacifica, Mrs. Copperfield tells Miss Goering that \u00E2\u0080\u0095although I love Pacifica very much, I think it is obvious that I am more important\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (198). Pacifica, depicted throughout the novel as Mrs. Copperfield\u00E2\u0080\u0098s sole passion, her reason for living, becomes little more than a vehicle for the latter\u00E2\u0080\u0098s self-understanding. Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s male companions play a similar role in the structure of her quest. That Andy \u00E2\u0080\u0095was no longer thinking of himself as a bum [...] would have pleased [Miss Goering] greatly had she been interested in reforming her friends.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0095Unfortunately,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 the narrator continues, \u00E2\u0080\u0095she was only interested in the course that she was following in order to attain her own salvation\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (172). The 67 other assumes a key role for Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, but not in terms of Butler\u00E2\u0080\u0098s theory of ethics and recognition; rather, the novel features characters who outwardly appeal to and court the other, while simultaneously silencing and excluding him or her. If Butler\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrating over wine produces several versions of her story, all addressed to an other, then the narration of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters exhibits a degree of intoxication that invalidates the other entirely. What remains for these characters, besides the empty appeals for the other, is the primal, overwhelming need to narrate. This narration, however, is for many of Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters an empty bid for authority and accountability: by engaging in narration, they undermine the very thing they hope to accomplish by it. I am echoing Al-Kassim here, who goes on to argue that \u00E2\u0080\u0095[l]osing [authority] does nothing to secure [Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield] as sovereign subjects of their speech\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (120). Contending that the title characters engage in \u00E2\u0080\u0095failed speech act[s]\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (120), she characterizes their attempts at speaking as pure loss. My reading differs from Al-Kassim\u00E2\u0080\u0098s in several ways, mainly because Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s approach to narration\u00E2\u0080\u0094while decidedly no more lucid or complete than the other characters\u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00E2\u0080\u0094strikes me as quite different from theirs. Furthermore, that she doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t narrate or explain her beliefs as the others do demonstrates less her inability to speak than her choosing not to do so. As the episode on the train with the red-faced woman illustrates, Miss Goering can be quite outspoken. The \u00E2\u0080\u0095failure to name\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Al-Kassim 120), then, is less a personal failing of Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s than a universal human condition bound up with the limitations of language and knowledge, of what can be expressed and known. These limitations are dramatized by Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters in much the same way that Butler invokes wine: the attempt to translate the complexities of experience, of systems of belief, into words\u00E2\u0080\u0094themselves imperfect vessels\u00E2\u0080\u0094is akin to being drunk. Bowles extends Butler\u00E2\u0080\u0098s 68 analogy by likening existence itself to drunkenness. That both Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield, with their dissimilar narrative modes, are effectively estranged from language illustrates this point. While Miss Goering\u00E2\u0080\u0098s narrative restraint may not offer an illuminating account of her philosophy, it productively draws attention to the difficulties attending any quest for knowledge of the world and self. Bowles doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0098t offer narratives of progress and fulfillment: the novel ends abruptly after a chaotic and discordant meeting between the two serious ladies, concluding, true to form, in an ambiguous manner. Miss Goering, abruptly abandoned by the menacing man she has attached herself to, thinks to herself: \u00E2\u0080\u0095Certainly I am nearer to becoming a saint [...] but is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield?\u00E2\u0080\u0096 The narrator supplies the last, beguiling line of the novel: \u00E2\u0080\u0095This latter possibility Miss Goering thought to be of considerable interest but of no great importance\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (201). The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s frameworks don\u00E2\u0080\u0098t allow for the epiphanic moment that might code \u00E2\u0080\u0095[t]his latter possibility\u00E2\u0080\u0096 to be of \u00E2\u0080\u0095great importance.\u00E2\u0080\u0096 In a similarly inconclusive scenario, Mrs. Copperfield, desperately trailing after Pacifica, who intends to marry an American man, has finally become a baby by relinquishing control and giving herself entirely to her libidinal drives. When she sums up her situation, she does so drunkenly, in both a narrative and physical sense. She declares, \u00E2\u0080\u0095I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I\u00E2\u0080\u0098ve wanted to do for years\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (197). Half celebratory declaration, half admission of failure, her words accurately reflect how the Bowlesian subject inhabits the world. The struggle to find meaning meets with the difficulties of naming it, and by doing so, charts the conditions of our unknowing. 69 4 Coda \u00E2\u0080\u0095I like to alcoholize my texts, turn down the volume and let them murmur across endless boundaries and miniscule epiphanies\u00E2\u0080\u0096 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania \u00E2\u0080\u0095Were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two,\u00E2\u0080\u0096 write modernist scholars Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, \u00E2\u0080\u0095one could do worse than light on expansion\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (737). The term conveys the \u00E2\u0080\u0095temporal, spatial, and vertical directions\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (737) in which the field has been moving, the first two of which speak to \u00E2\u0080\u0095the growing historical and geographical reach of modernist studies\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Friedman \u00E2\u0080\u0095Planetarity\u00E2\u0080\u0096 473), while the third is one \u00E2\u0080\u0095in which once quite sharp boundaries between high art and popular forms of culture have been reconsidered; in which canons have been critiqued and reconfigured; in which works by marginalized social groups have been encountered with fresh eyes and ears; and in which scholarly inquiry has increasingly extended to matters of production, dissemination, and reception\u00E2\u0080\u0096 (Mao and Walkowitz 737-738). My project engages with this last category, challenging the academy\u00E2\u0080\u0098s gendered and often narrow constructions of the alcoholic modernist, while calling for analyses that reflexively employ and comment on these culturally pervasive constructions. My examination of the figure of the female alcoholic as writer and subject serves as a preliminary step in the rethinking of the modernist drunk narrative, and points to areas deserving of further research; I\u00E2\u0080\u0098m thinking specifically of areas that go beyond white, middle-class, heterosexual alcoholism. While I briefly addressed the critical reception to Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s and Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s lives and work in the introduction, it was chiefly in order to demonstrate the glaring lack of attention paid to both their alcoholism and their literary treatments of it; there is certainly a fruitful line of inquiry that considers, for example, how Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s colonial status and Bowles\u00E2\u0080\u0098s homosexuality affect the discussion. The portraits I have 70 sketched here will necessarily be complicated and nuanced by factors of sexuality, class, and race. Furthermore, my thesis suggests ways of expanding current practices of modernist studies by proposing the field forges stronger connections with addiction studies, since, modernism\u00E2\u0080\u0094 particularly its incarnations in North America and Europe\u00E2\u0080\u0094has been marked by alcohol consumption and abuse in much the same way as romanticism calls to mind opium addiction. If, to return to Hemingway\u00E2\u0080\u0098s story, Jig\u00E2\u0080\u0098s desires remain unfulfilled and unexpressed in the end, repressed in favour of a continued life of drinks and travel, Rhys and Bowles offer an alternative vision of the modern woman who drinks. Rhys, writing against (and from within) the discursive construction of the female alcoholic, offers an epistemology grounded in abjection and disguise. Sasha arrives at her incisive and unromantic view of humanity by virtue of being drunk and female. In contrast to Rhys\u00E2\u0080\u0098s overt exploration of the female alcoholic, Bowles employs drunkenness as an overarching metaphor for both narrating and existing. The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0098s characters, speaking either enigmatically or excessively, all ultimately gesture to the difficulties involved in the search for and articulation of meaning. 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